Vulkan 1.4.324 is out today as the first Vulkan API specification update in two weeks with a variety of clarifications/corrections plus a new extension from AMD.
VK_AMDX_dense_geometry_format is the new experimental AMD vendor extension in Vulkan 1.4.324. VK_AMDX_dense_geometry_format is for providing the ability to build ray-tracing acceleration structures from pre-compressed Dense Geometry Format geometry data.
Dense Geometry Format “DGF” was developed by AMD as a means of compressing triangle meshes for more efficient hardware ray-tracing. Those curious about the Dense Geometry Format can read the DGF whitepaper from last year. AMD also maintains the DGF SDK as part of GPUOpen and is fully open-source software. There is also this blog post from earlier in the year covering more about Dense Geometry Format for helping the AMD ray-tracing efforts.
So with today’s Vulkan spec update VK_AMDX_dense_geometry_format is now available for those wanting to experiment with using DGF for more efficient and performant Vulkan ray-tracing on AMD GPUs. It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is ultimately by game developers around DGF.
More details on the Vulkan 1.4.324 spec changes via Vulkan-Docs on GitHub.
