Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers.
The new extension introduced by Vulkan 1.4.344 is VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product. Valve’s Mike Blumenkrantz and Georg Lehmann worked on the VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product extension. With VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product is the ability to use mixed precision dot product accumulate operations in shaders.
The VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product extension depends upon a new SPIR-V extension, SPV_VALVE_mixed_float_dot_product. SPV_VALVE_mixed_float_dot_product allows support for dot product operations on low-precision inputs with potentially higher precision accumulation. SPV_VALVE_mixed_float_dot_product initially lays out support for four different types:
– 2 component vector of 16bit float inputs with 32bit accumulation
– 2 component vector of 16bit float inputs with 16bit accumulation
– 2 component vector of bfloat16 inputs with 32bit or bfloat16 accumulation
– 4 component vector of 8bit float inputs with 32bit accumulation
That’s the main highlight of today’s Vulkan 1.4.344 update. All the changes in this spec revision can be found via GitHub.
