Vulkan 1.1.97 Released With Five New Extensions

As the first Vulkan specification update in nearly one month and just ahead of CES where we'll see new graphics hardware, Vulkan 1.1.97 has been released with a handful of new extensions.

Vulkan 1.1.97 has the usual work on documentation corrections/clarifications, but most interesting are the new extensions:

VK_EXT_buffer_device_address - Provides a means to query a buffer device address value for a buffer. That value can then be used to access the buffer memory via PhysicalStorageBufferEXT in GLSL and SPV_EXT_physical_storage_buffer from SPIR-V.

VK_EXT_memory_budget - This exposes the memory used and total memory budgeted for a memory heap. From there it can be estimated for how much total memory from each heap a process is using at a particular moment.

VK_EXT_memory_priority - This allows specifying a priority value at memory allocation time. This memory priority is used for trying to keep those allocations in device-local memory rather than potentially moving it to non-device-local-memory when a heap becomes full. These new Vulkan memory extensions were developed by NVIDIA engineers.

VK_EXT_validation_features - A LunarG-developed extension for enabling/disabling different validation features and validation layer features.

VK_KHR_depth_stencil_resolve - Allows automatically resolving multi-sampled depth/stencil attachments in a sub-pass.

Overall this is a nice update with the useful new Vulkan memory extensions as well as VK_EXT_validation_features being quite practical too. The revised Vulkan documentation can be found via Khronos.org.