Khronos has introduced a new extension named VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library that allows for shaders to be compiled much earlier than at full Pipeline State Object (PSO) creation time. By leveraging this extension, I was able to avoid many causes of frame hitches due to PSOs being late-created at draw time in the Source 2 Vulkan renderer. The extension spec was released today and SDK support will follow soon.

A new blog from Collabora shows the latest utilities and helpers to make writing Vulkan drivers easier and demonstrates the latest Mesa best practices.

With the release of Mesa 22.1, Lavapipe exposes Vulkan 1.3 for running atop CPUs.

The Advanced Media Framework SDK provides developers with optimal access to AMD GPUs for multimedia processing. In the latest release, v1.4.24.0, AMD has enabled Vulkan support for HEVC Encoder (Navi+) and have improved H264 encoding on Vulkan for both Windows & Linux Navi+.

Basemark launched GPUScore, an all-new GPU performance benchmarking suite to produce the most professional measurements in the industry. GPUScore will consist of three different testing suites. The first one is GPUScore: Relic of LIfe compares Vulkan and DirectX accelerated ray tracing performance.

OpenCL developers can try out new provisional OpenCL/Vulkan Interop functionality today with NVIDIA’s latest drivers and downloadable sample code.

Today, The Khronos Group announced the public release of the royalty-free Vulkan Safety-Critical (SC) 1.0 API Specification to enable safety-critical industries to deploy state-of-the-art GPU graphics and compute acceleration while meeting the highest levels of functional safety requirements. The Vulkan SC Conformance Test Suite is also freely available in open source, and multiple vendors have officially-conformant Vulkan SC 1.0 implementations. Industry feedback on the specification is welcome at the Vulkan SC specification GitHub repository.

Explore the Vulkan 1.3 SDK at the next Vulkanised webinar. Engineers from LunarG will give tutorials on:

• Validation Layer Performance
• Vulkan Profiles Toolset

After each session there will be a Q&A session for audience members.

Khronos has released a new “Made with Vulkan” public repository to raise awareness of just how pervasive the Vulkan ecosystem is becoming. The tool is aimed at being transparent about what titles use Vulkan and to provide a tool to the community that is easy to search, filter, or group by title.

The new Vulkan SDK released by LunarG includes Vulkan Profiles Toolset, an improved validation layer performance for multi-threaded applications, and new extensions.

The benefits of using Vulkan are clear, more games arriving on more devices than ever before, increased frame rates, and Vulkan being the API of choice for new generation titles on Android. Vulkan is the only API that’s both cross-platform and open-source, so make the switch today and don’t leave performance on the table.

The 2021 Vulkan Ecosystem and SDK Survey results are in! Read the report and learn LunarG’s plan for the 2022 SDK and ecosystem improvements.

The Khronos Group released the Vulkan 1.3 specification today, incorporating and mandating proven, developer-requested extensions, as well as a public roadmap and profiles to strengthen the Vulkan Ecosystem and provide visibility into Vulkan’s future requirements for key markets.

New extensions include dynamic rendering, an additional dynamic state, an improved synchronization API, and a range of other features. The Vulkan public roadmap aims to consolidate the support for selected extensions to provide a common functionality baseline in key markets to reduce feature fragmentation. The new Vulkan profile mechanism enables the precise specification and management of sets of API capabilities to streamline development and deployment or portable applications.