Vulkan 1.2.134 Released With Many Fixes/Clarifications, New Qualcomm Extension

The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.2.134 as their newest revision to this high-performance graphics/compute API.

As usual, the release is led by fixes and clarifications to the specification. There is improved verbage in some areas, registry schema improvements, and other routine maintenance items.

The lone new extension in this release is VK_QCOM_render_pass_transform. As implied by the vendor prefix, this new Vulkan extension was developed by Qualcomm. The VK_QCOM_render_pass_transform allows applications/games to enable driver support for render pass transform functionality. For display units that don't support native screen rotation, flipping between portrait and landscape modes is to be handled as a later Vulkan composition pass or the application can also render frames pre-rotated if supported in order to avoid that additional overhead. Having the application/engine pre-rotate is Qualcomm's ideal approach in this situation to avoid placing the burden on the presentation engine that will lead to power/performance implications, but either approach works for Qualcomm with Vulkan. With VK_QCOM_render_pass_transform, the driver is able to handle more of the burden for the pre-rotate method in order to achieve optimal power/performance in such situations.

More details on render pass transform and the other changes via the Vulkan 1.2.134 update.