The newest feature merged this weekend to Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan driver for Linux systems is support for the VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64 extension.
VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64 allows for 64-bit integer atomic operations on Vulkan images. Per the spec:
“This extension extends existing 64-bit integer atomic support to enable these operations on images as well.
When working with large 2- or 3-dimensional data sets (e.g. rasterization or screen-space effects), image accesses are generally more efficient than equivalent buffer accesses. This extension allows applications relying on 64-bit integer atomics in this manner to quickly improve performance with only relatively minor code changes.”
VK_EXT_shader_image_atomic_int64 is a nearly five year old extension and was worked on by Faith Ekstrand of the Intel ANV driver team at the time. Finally now though for Mesa 25.1 it’s being wired up for the ANV driver.
With yesterday’s merge, this Vulkan image atomic int64 support is limited to working on non-sparse images.
