Intel Is Working On A Vulkan Overlay Layer, Inspired By Gallium3D HUD

Aside from some out-of-tree experiments last year by one of Valve's developers on a RADV Vulkan HUD of similar nature to the popular Gallium HUD option, it turns out an Intel developer has recently been working on a Vulkan overlay layer to provide "Gallium HUD" inspired information.

Lionel Landwerlin is the open-source Intel developer that has begun working on this Intel Vulkan driver "heads-up display" implemented as a Vulkan overlay layer. The code is intended to provide Vulkan swapchain information and various statistics of use to Vulkan driver developers and game developers.

The code is under a merge request for Mesa but is considered experimental at this point. Particularly for multi-threaded Vulkan programs it may end up crashing in its current form.

As a Vulkan layer it's fairly portable and could end up being useful to the RADV Vulkan driver too albeit some of the interfaces for querying of the data may be different but from a quick look appears to be rather portable already for use by RADV.

It does report the frames and frame timing information that may be useful to some gamers but we'll see what other metrics it may pick up like clock frequency reporting and thermals that may make it of more interest to gamers rather than just developers.