Khronos released Vulkan 1.3, the Vulkan Public Roadmap, and a mechanism for profiles that streamlines the development and deployment of portable applications.
Khronos has released Vulkan 1.3, the open, royalty-free cross-platform 3D graphics API, which will provide more visibility into Vulkan's future requirements and make it easier to develop content.
The new version includes several extensions requested by the developer community, such as dynamic rendering, additional dynamic state, an improved synchronization API, and other features. It must be noted that, unlike previous revisions, the features added to Vulkan 1.3 are non-optional. Vulkan 1.3 is accelerated on OpenGL ES 3.1-class hardware, allowing the core API to be supported in a wide range of devices and markets.
According to Khronos, previously, developers working on a title often couldn't understand how well supported a certain feature was, so the company defined a public roadmap. The Vulkan Roadmap will help the company decide where and how to spend its development efforts. Khronos promises to create milestones along the roadmap "to define features that will become the new baseline for mid-to-high-end GPUs across smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, and console markets." The roadmap milestones have certain advantages over the previous use of optional features, such as grouping of features into a coherent set, support from vendors shipping into the targeted markets, a target release timeline.
Thus, the roadmap "provides hardware vendors a more precise target base specification, enables platform owners to better plan hardware expectations, and gives developers a known feature baseline to use for applications and games."
The first milestone in the Vulkan Roadmap is Vulkan Roadmap 2022. The milestone requires support for Vulkan 1.3 and the extensions the Vulkan Working Group considers crucial for the target market, including descriptor indexing, fragment shader stores and atomics, subgroup support in fragment shaders, independent blending, sample shading, anisotropic filtering, YCbCr sampling, and scalar block layout for buffer resources.
"Roadmap 2022 also raises minimum values for many hardware limits, including max image and image array dimensions, max subgroup size, and various limits on how many resources can be accessed per shader stage."
The company also introduced a new Vulkan profile mechanism, which "enables the precise specification and management of sets of API capabilities." Each profile specifies a core version of Vulkan in addition to required extensions, with supported limits, features, and formats. Profiles allow sharing functionality requirements and device capabilities between participants in the Vulkan ecosystem "to streamline the development and deployment of portable applications. The Vulkan Roadmap 2022 Profile will encode the Vulkan roadmap’s first milestone currently documented in the Vulkan 1.3 specification for release with the Vulkan SDK in mid-February."
The update will allow developers to make application-specific feature profiles, determine if a device supports a given profile, and enable the features and extensions in a profile at application startup. Vulkan profiles with tooling will be released in mid-February as part of the Vulkan 1.3 SDK and will include a machine-readable file format for profile definitions, files defining the profiles released to date, a header-only library, and profile simulation support.
There are multiple popular titles made with Vulkan, including Baldur's Gate 3, Dota 2, Fortnite, Hades, Half Life: Alyx, and many others.
If you want to know more about the update, check out Khronos's website. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.