RADV Driver Lands Support For Vulkan's New Descriptor Indexing Extension

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 19 April 2018 at 01:18 AM EDT. Add A Comment
RADEON
Earlier this month with the Vulkan 1.1.72 specification update was the new VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension that is quickly being well received by developers.

The VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing extension allows for creating large descriptor sets made up of all their combined resources and selecting those resources via dynamic indexes in a shader.

Just on Tuesday NVIDIA released a new Vulkan beta driver shipping this extension along with other updates. The latest now is RADV in Mesa 18.1-dev Git already supporting it.

As part of this work Bas Nieuwenhuizen pushed a number of RADV commits to Mesa 18.1 on Wednesday. It's great seeing the continued punctual pace being achieved by this open-source Vulkan driver (along with Intel ANV) for keeping up with the upstream specifications, which is quite an accomplishment and also is a testament to the simpler Vulkan design compared to OpenGL with the horror stories many of you remember from years ago about often support belated by months or even years behind the latest specifications. Also helping out this current situation has been the Vulkan CTS (Conformance Test Suite) being open-source and freely available, more companies being involved (such as Valve and Red Hat), and the much more frequent but smaller specification updates.
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