Vulkan 1.2.175 Published With Many New Extensions
Vulkan 1.2.175 is a very exciting update to the Vulkan API. Besides the usual assortment of corrections and clarifications, Vulkan 1.2.175 comes with yet more extensions:
VK_EXT_color_write_enable - Allows selectively enabling/disabling writes to output color attachments via a pipeline dynamic state. This can potentially allow for reducing pipeline counts and efficiency gains.
VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state - By making vertex input binding and attribute descriptions allow for dynamic state support, this also allows for a reduction in the number of pipeline objects that may be needed.
VK_EXT_ycbcr_2plane_444_format - Support for some YCbCr formats that are common for video encode/decode.
VK_NV_inherited_viewport_scissor - The ability for a secondary command buffer to inherit dynamic viewport and scissor state from a primary command buffer or previous secondary command buffer.
But what, there's more! Also new to Vulkan 1.2.175 are VK_KHR_video_queue, VK_KHR_video_decode_queue, VK_KHR_video_encode_queue, VK_EXT_video_decode_h264, VK_EXT_video_decode_h265, and VK_EXT_video_encode_h264. Vulkan now has public video core and codecs provisional extension support!
The new extensions and other changes of Vulkan 1.2.175 are public via GitHub since earlier this morning. Most exciting are the new Vulkan video extensions made public by the commit... But the embargo on that hasn't expired yet, so check back shortly when we can talk more about that new functionality at length. Going off that public commit though it does outline the Vulkan video core extensions and that video encode/decode via Vulkan with this common API is indeed here albeit in a provisional state. With contributors from AMD and NVIDIA especially, hopefully Vulkan Video will lead to broad support and nice cross-platform GPU-accelerated video encode/decode on both Windows and Linux. Worth noting is there are H.264/H.265 extensions but not yet VP9/AV1 as part of Vulkan 1.2.175.
UPDATE (9AM EST): See Vulkan Video Arrives For New Industry-Standard Video Encode/Decode for all the details on the new video capabilities of Vulkan.
6 Comments
