Vulkan 1.2.135 Released With New + Promoted NVIDIA Extensions In Addition To Ray-Tracing

Written by Michael Larabel in Vulkan on 17 March 2020 at 12:56 PM EDT. 13 Comments
VULKAN
While the most prominent addition to today's Vulkan 1.2.135 update is the provisional ray-tracing support, there are also other new extensions with this update.

New extensions with Vulkan 1.2.135 include:

VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations - Plumbs the infrastructure for supporting deferrable commands but without introducing any deferrable commands yet. This is done as part of the working group's ray-tracing enablement.

VK_KHR_pipeline_library - A special pipeline that defines shaders / shader groups that can be linked into other pipelines. Again, brought up as part of the Vulkan ray-tracing.

VK_KHR_ray_tracing - The provisional ray-tracing extension for Vulkan that is based in part on NVIDIA's vendor-specific ray-tracing extension and also with Microsoft DXR HLSL compatibility in mind.

VK_EXT_pipeline_creation_cache_control - An extension to provide information about potential pipeline creation costs to try to inform the software about potential time consuming hits when the software is not able to handle ahead-of-time creation.

VK_NV_device_diagnostics_config - A NVIDIA vendor extension for applications making use of the Nsight Aftermath SDK in the ability to integrate device crash dumps into their error reporting infrastructure,

VK_NV_device_generated_commands - The NVIDIA-stabilized version of the earlier experimental device-generated commands extension first introduced in 2016. That's now all stable with this new NV_device_generated_commands extension. This NVIDIA blog post updated today outlines the usage.

There are also various fixes to the spec as outlined via the changes for Vulkan 1.2.135.
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