Just over a year since the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification, the Khronos Group today announced the release of Vulkan 1.3. This release focuses heavily on eliminating fragmentation by consolidating several popular extensions into the core specification as well as introducing device profiles. Additionally new extension support for VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering should streamline the rendering process making it more straightforward to get up and running with Vulkan.
“In this new phase of Vulkan’s evolution, the Vulkan Working Group is taking significant steps to reduce fragmentation across the ecosystem and increase Vulkan’s value to the industry as a reliable cross-platform GPU API. We continue to expose new hardware features as extensions while improving the Vulkan API with new core versions that are portable to a wide range of devices. And now with the Vulkan Roadmap, we are committing to enhanced transparency and communication to forge industry consensus on baseline functionality Profiles that best serve Vulkan’s key markets,” said Tom Olson, Vulkan Working Group Chair and Distinguished Engineer at Arm.
Day one Vulkan 1.3 driver support is already available for NVIDIA devices, while AMD announced beta support with official drivers coming in the next few months.
Key Links
Vulkan 1.3 and Vulkan 2022 Roadmap
Vulkan 1.3 Specification (PDF)
VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering proposal
You can learn more about Vulkan and the Vulkan 1.3 specification release in the video below.