This blog series discusses the port of the game Detroit: Become Human from PlayStation® 4 to P and is written jointly by Ronan Marchalot, 3D engine director, and 3D engine senior developers Nicolas Vizerie and Jonathan Siret from Quantic Dream, along with Lou Kramer, who is a developer technology engineer from AMD. The first instalment in this series walks the reader through choosing an API: Already having an OpenGL working version, the choice is between Direct X 12 and Vulkan. Read the post to learn which was chosen.
Khronos has shipped the provisional version of the Vulkan Portability Extension version 1.0 and it is shipping today in both MoltenVK and gfx-portability. If you want to try out the extension, build MoltenVK or download gfx-portability-0.8.1 and redirect the Vulkan loader to a JSON manifest using the regular ICD logic, as if MoltenVK and gfx-portability were native Vulkan drivers. Learn more about the Vulkan Portability Initiative and explore the value of layered implementations to the graphics community in this blog.
With this release, NVIDIA has added support for Vulkan and Vulkan Ray Tracing in the Shader Profiler. Vulkan GLSL shaders are supported in the same way that was previously possible for D3D12 and DXR HLSL shaders. Users that provide debug information for their shaders can see detailed performance data mapped directly to the GLSL source lines it is associated with. This allows users to pinpoint performance issues caused by stalls in the shader instruction pipeline.
The Guide to Vulkan Synchronization Validation, a LunarG white paper, provides an overview of synchronization and why it is important along with a quick-start guide for new users. The reader will learn about synchronization validation and associated validation messages, how to use synchronization validation, and how to optimize it. Learn more about the whitepaper and why correct synchronization is important in this blog post.
Laminar Research have now released a huge upgrade to their flight simulator with X-Plane 11.50, which brings in lots of rendering changes and advancements.
They completely rewrote their rendering engine to provide Vulkan (on Windows and Linux systems) and Metal (on Mac). This should provide X-Plane 11 players with smoother frame rates, with far less stuttering and better performance overall. For the Linux version you need at least NVIDIA 440.26 and for AMD they’re supporting the ‘official AMD GPU drivers’ along with amdvlk but they didn’t state any particular version.
AMD’s latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver - 20.8.3 - has been released. Included are a few recent Vulkan extension that aim to improve developer and user experience. These Vulkan extensions include:
- VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state
- VK_EXT_private_data
- VK_EXT_image_robustness
- VK_GOOGLE_user_type
Back in May, GPUOpen released four new FidelityFX effects to join their widely-used FidelityFX CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) effect.
Now, they are making these shiny new effects even better by introducing Vulkan support to:
- FidelityFX SSSR (Stochastic Screen Space Reflections).
- FidelityFX LPM (Luminance Preserving Mapper).
- FidelityFX CACAO (Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion)
SiliconArts has become a full member of the Khronos Group standards consortium to support the development and ratification of ray tracing extensions to the Vulkan cross-platform 3D API. The company will extend its RayCore GPU cores to be compliant with the upcoming Vulkan ray tracing extensions, providing the necessary functionality to accelerate new Vulkan API calls. When integrated with existing raster shader GPUs, the resulting solution off-loads the ray tracing calls while preserving the existing raster graphics pipeline, to enhance real-time photo-realistic graphics quality on a wide range of devices.
The Khronos Vulkan Working Group has decided to rename the default branch for the Vulkan-Docs repository from ‘master’ to ‘main’. This is expected to occur over the weekend of August 29-30, 2020, assuming no unanticipated issues come up. A GitHub issue has been created with additional information. Downstream consumers of Vulkan-Docs, starting with the first specification update after August 30, 2020, you should pull from ‘main’ branch to get the current repository contents. Please refer to this GitHub issue for all further updates.
Arm is delighted to announce astcenc 2.0! The ‘astcenc’ ASTC compression tool was first developed by Arm while ASTC was progressing through the Khronos standardization process seven years ago. astcenc has become widely used as the de facto reference encoder for ASTC, as it leverages all format features, including the full set of available block sizes and color profiles, to deliver high-quality encoded textures that are possible when effectively using ASTC’s flexible capabilities. This is a major update which provides multiple significant improvements for middleware and content creators. Learn move about astcenc 2.0 in the Khronos blog ‘Create ASTC textures faster with the new astcenc 2.0 open source compression tool’ written by our guest, Peter Harris, from Arm.
Atypical Games, with support from Samsung, took on the task of implementing Vulkan support into their engine. In this blog, Razvan Baraitaru, Atypical Games, will share his experiences with porting to Vulkan and then later Calum Shields, Samsung, will discuss some of the issues that cropped up in the Android implementation of “Sky Gamblers: Infinite Jets”. There are numerous reasons for choosing Vulkan. Primarily it creates an opportunity for better performance and compatibility across many of our target platforms - Android, Nintendo Switch and Windows. Also, we had in mind some possible future Stadia games where Vulkan is the only graphics API.
The LibreOffice Project announces the availability of LibreOffice 7.0, a new major release providing significant new features: support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3; Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration for better performance; and carefully improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. Read on for the complete announcement.
LunarG has released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.148.0. This SDK introduces a redesigned Vulkan Configurator, vkconfig, and Synchronization validation. DirectX Shader Compiler (DXC) is now included in the Linux and macOS SDKs (previously only included with the Windows SDK). Validation Layer support has been added for Vulkan Synchronization that supports single command buffers. This validation is exposed by the Vulkan Configurator for easy enablement. Read on for more information about the enhanced vkconfig and other new features in this SDK.
Imagination Technologies has posted a new tutorial series: Vulkan synchronisation and graphics-compute-graphics hazards. Follow along with this in-depth walk through on maintaining peak performance of the GPU.