Vulkan 1.1.117 Adds Line Rasterization - Helping Out CAD Applications & More

In addition to the release of OpenXR 1.0 for kicking off SIGGRAPH 2019 week, The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1.117 as a fairly notable update to this high-performance graphics API.

This SIGGRAPH update to Vulkan brings three new extensions.

VK_EXT_line_rasterization - This extension developed by NVIDIA and Intel is for line rasterization features commonly used by CAD applications with OpenGL and the like. There is support for Bresenham-style line rasterization, smooth rectangular lines, stiplined lines, and other new capabilities.

VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_hdr - Support for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression's High Dynamic Range (HDR) profile. ASTC HDR has long been available in OpenGL with KHR_texture_compression_astc_ldr while now has formally been added to Vulkan for this royalty-free texture compression means.

VK_EXT_index_type_uint8 - This allows for uint8 indices with the Vulkan bind index buffer.

With the introduction of VK_EXT_line_rasterization, I can't help but wonder if Autodesk is about to announce they will be using Vulkan with their future products... This line rasterization support is clearly aimed at CAD software like 3ds Max. It was also only last week that Autodesk joined The Khronos Group with a reported focus on glTF.

Vulkan 1.1.117 also has a number of corrections as outlined with this Git commit.