Vulkan 1.1.76 Released With KHR_draw_indirect_count & KHR_get_display_properties2

Vulkan 1.1.76 has just been released ahead of the US Memorial Day weekend with new extensions to excite Vulkan developers.

The two new extensions in Vulkan 1.1.176 are VK_KHR_get_display_properties2 and VK_KHR_draw_indirect_count, both of which are notable additions.

The VK_KHR_get_display_properties2 extension allows querying device display properties and capabilities in an extensible manner. This can be used for exposing the display properties, plane details, mode properties, and related information. This extension was led by NVIDIA and Google and also comes into play for VR HMD use-cases and more.

VK_KHR_draw_indirect_count is based upon the former AMD Vulkan extension for draw indirect count and allows an application to source the number of draw calls for indirect draw calls from a buffer and generate arbitrary amounts of draw commands on the GPU itself.

NVIDIA's new Vulkan beta driver is the first Linux driver supporting both of these new extensions, but we imagine the ANV/RADV patches won't be far behind.

In addition to the new extensions and various fixes/corrections to the documentation, this is also the first release to bundle the exception clause for the Vulkan XML (vk.xml) file so it can be used by (L)GPL projects. This is what I was talking about yesterday in Vulkan Adds An Exception To Address Wine's Code License Incompatibility with Wine being the big benefactor of this change.

The updated Vulkan specification can be read at Khronos.org.