Vulkan 1.4.340 is out today as the first significant new Vulkan API update following the end of year holidays. With Vulkan 1.4.340 comes four new extensions worth talking about.
New to Vulkan 1.4.340 are bug fixes plus a few notable extensions:
VK_EXT_descriptor_heap – This is a big one. VK_EXT_descriptor_heap was worked on by NVIDIA, AMD, Arm, Nintendo, Valve, Google, and many other stakeholders. This extension allows for explicit management of descriptors and the memory used to store descriptors (descriptor heaps). This addresses issues uncovered with VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer and should provide more portable guarantees and more predictable performance characteristics. VK_EXT_descriptor_heap should be of big help to Steam Play (VKD3D-Proton usage) and also for addressing issues in different Vulkan drivers like from NVIDIA around their Proton gaming performance.
VK_KHR_internally_synchronized_queues – The VK_KHR_internally_synchronized_queues extension allows applications / game engines to opt-in to queues to be internally synchronized so that there is no need for externally synchronizing them. This addresses issues for software needing to synchronize access to queues.
VK_EXT_shader_subgroup_partitioned – This extension from NVIDIA allows support for a new class of shader group operations on subgroups via the GLSL GL_NV_shader_subgroup_partitioned and SPIR-V SPV_EXT_shader_subgroup_partitioned extensions.
VK_NV_push_constant_bank_support – This NVIDIA extension is also listed as new to Vulkan 1.4.340 but the extension text isn’t part of today’s Git commit as a possible oversight/issue.
Vulkan 1.4.340 is a great update especially with the descriptor heap extension added. More details on the Vulkan 1.4.340 changes via this commit.
