Vulkan tagged stories

The set of extensions known as Vulkan Video, developed by the Vulkan® Working Group at The Khronos® Group, provides developers with vendor-independent access to video decoding and encoding functionality in modern GPU hardware. Today, with the release of version 1.4.321 of the Vulkan specification, Vulkan Video is once again being expanded for encoding operations with the introduction of the Encode Intra-refresh extension—the second

Synchronization in Vulkan® has long been one of its most notorious challenges, something developers haven’t been shy about reminding us. The Khronos® Vulkan Working Group has been steadily working to make Vulkan a joy to use, and simplifying the synchronization model has been high on our priority list. One of the most frequent developer frustrations has been the complexity of managing image layouts, a pain point we’re tackling

The set of extensions known as "Vulkan Video", developed by the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos®, provides developers with vendor-independent access to video decoding and encoding functionality in modern GPU hardware. Today, with the release of version 1.4.317 of the Vulkan specification, this set of extensions is being expanded once again with the introduction of VP9 decoding. VP9 was among the first royalty-free codecs to gain mass ado

Datoviz is a cross-platform, open-source, high-performance GPU scientific data visualization library designed for interactive exploration of large datasets. Written in C/C++, it leverages the Khronos Vulkan® graphics API and integrates with the glfw window library. Datoviz aims to provide a unified, language-agnostic platform for interactive visualization in both 2D and 3D, with support for GUIs and general-purpose GPU compute.

Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.302, Khronos is proud to announce two new encode extensions. First, the highly anticipated Encode AV1 extension enhances Vulkan Video by adding AV1 encode functionality to complement its existing AV1 decode support. This milestone means that Vulkan Video now provides full decode AND encode acceleration for the H.264, H.265 and AV1 codec standards. Additionally, the new Encode Quantization Map extension introduces advanced encoding features for all supported codecs to Vulkan Video developers for the first time. We are confident these extensions provide the necessary building blocks for your advanced Vulkan Video applications!

The Vulkan® Working Group has released the VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension, enabling direct retrieval of binary data associated with individual pipelines, bypassing the VkPipelineCache mechanism, and enabling applications to explicitly manage pipeline caching.

On June 21, 2024 the Vulkan® SC™ working group at the Khronos® Group released the Vulkan SC 1.0.15 specification, the latest maintenance update to the “Vulkan Safety Critical” open standard API, which enables GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in systems that are certified to meet industry functional safety standards. 

Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) is a high-performance, extensible software platform for collaboratively creating, editing, and simulating complex 3D scenes. OpenUSD is more than a file format and scene representation—it's an extensible framework of libraries, tools, and plugins. This includes the Hydra rendering framework, an open source OpenUSD framework that decouples scene descriptions from renderers, and the Storm renderer, a rasterizer aimed at performance and scalability.

Vulkan® Portability™ is a Khronos® initiative to promote the consistent use of Vulkan functionality that is layered over other underlying APIs to enable the portable deployment of Vulkan applications on platforms without Vulkan native drivers, such as Apple’s macOS and iOS. In March 2024, Richard Wright from LunarG updated the State of Vulkan on Apple Devices white paper to reflect the latest availability of the Vulkan SDK on Apple platforms, and its ability to be used to develop applications that are fully compatible with the Apple App Store.

The Vulkan Working Group at Khronos has developed a set of video format decode and encode extensions, collectively referred to as Vulkan Video. Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.277, the Working Group is proud to announce the new Decode AV1 video extension. Similar to the Vulkan project in its goals, AV1 is a royalty-free open standard for video compression developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) delivering industry-leading performance and quality. The result of broad industry collaboration and support, the Decode AV1 extension is a major milestone that builds on the foundation of Vulkan Video to bring cross-platform portable and performant AV1 decode to engines and applications everywhere.

The SPIR™ Working Group has developed two new SPIR-V extensions (and corresponding Vulkan® extensions) to provide shader authors with more guarantees about the execution model of shaders. These extensions formalize behavior many authors have previously taken for granted, so that they can now be relied upon across the ecosystem.

Today we’re happy to announce the release of VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read, which adds support for local dependencies to dynamic rendering; enabling developers to fully move over to dynamic rendering as support is rolled out.

In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively referred to as ‘Vulkan Video’ which provide seamless encoding and decoding of video streams using a variety of video coding standards. The December 2022 release of Vulkan 1.3.238 saw the finalization of the extensions to decode H.264 and H.265, and today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized their counterpart: the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams. Leveraging the Vulkan framework, they provide a standardized, seamless, low-overhead, and highly controllable way to produce H.264 and H.265 video via hardware accelerators, with applications ranging from real-time, low-latency streaming to offline server-scale transcoding.

One of the most common requests that the Vulkan Working Group gets from the developer community is to improve Vulkan documentation, which would make it quicker and easier to find the information needed to learn Vulkan, and to navigate through the various kinds of information needed for application development. Over the past few months, the Vulkan Working Group has been working hard to improve the developer experience by streamlining access to our key documentation. We have gathered all the key documents including the specifications, guides, tutorials and samples into a single website to allow developers to easily find the right documents and navigate quickly to the information they need.

Vulkan® SC is a streamlined API based on the Khronos® Vulkan API that enables state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in safety-critical systems. On September 27, 2023, the Vulkan SC Working Group at Khronos released the latest Vulkan SC 1.0.13 maintenance update. Alongside the new specification there are significant Vulkan SC tooling updates and streamlined ecosystem synergy with mainstream Vulkan. R