Khronos Group launches Vulkan 1.4 API for cross-platform graphics and compute

Khronos Groupan open consortium of technology companies focused on interoperability standards, has announced Vulkan release 1.4.

It is the latest version of its free, cross-platform 3D graphics and computer application programming interface (API), and makes it easy to run 3D games and other software on hardware platforms.

Vulkan 1.4 integrates and commits support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying the development and deployment of cross-platform applications.

“Vulkan 1.4 is a developer-driven update that enhances the value of Vulkan as a stable, reliable framework for creating graphics-intensive applications on any platform,” said Tom Olson, outgoing chair of the Vulkan Working Group, in a statement. “As I step down, I am proud to see the foundations we laid through our roadmaps come to fruition.” Our milestone roadmap plans have empowered developers with new levels of flexibility and performance, setting Vulkan on a path of continued innovation and wider adoption for years to come.”

The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates a number of previously optional extensions, features and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the 2022 and 2024 Vulkan Roadmaps and associated profiles.

Vulkan 1.4 imposes new implementation requirements to ensure that portable, cross-platform applications can stream large amounts of data to the device while simultaneously rendering at full performance. Previously optional extensions and features critical to new high-performance applications are now mandatory in Vulkan 1.4, ensuring their reliable availability across multiple platforms. These include push descriptors, dynamic local read rendering, and scalar block layouts.

It also has maintenance extensions up to and including VK_KHR_maintenance6 that are now part of the core Vulkan 1.4 specification. It also has 8K rendering with up to eight separate render targets now guaranteed to be supported, along with several other limit increases.

“Vulkan 1.4 is a revolutionary release that directly brings long-requested features and proven extensions to the core standard.” By committing to these capabilities, we’re improving Vulkan’s flexibility and performance on a wider range of devices, making it easier for developers to create cutting-edge apps with the confidence that they’ll run reliably on any platform,” said Ralph Potter, newly appointed Vulkan employee. the president of the group, in a statement.

The Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) is a comprehensive set of nearly three million open source tests that all Vulkan implementers must pass, increasing consistency across multiple platforms. AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung have development drivers that have passed Vulkan 1.4 compliance. In addition, Mesa open-source Linux drivers have passed Vulkan 1.4 compliance on AMD, Apple, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm hardware. Production drivers that have passed Khronos’ formal conformance testing process are listed in the Vulkan Compliant Product Registry.

Vulkan’s ecosystem of tools continues to grow, providing developers with powerful community-driven tools that improve shader portability and performance. The Vulkan SDK from LunarG supports multiple shading languages, including HLSL, GLSL, and Slang—now an open source project hosted by Khronos—allowing developers to use the shading language that best suits their technical and commercial requirements. The Vulkan SDK will be updated to include support for version 1.4 in January 2025.

The Khronos Vulkan Working Group said it welcomes feedback on Vulkan 1.4 on GitHub Vulkan-Docs. Developers are also encouraged to join the Vulkan Discord channel and other support forums on vulkan.org.

Khronos will host the Vulkan BOF (Birds of a Feather) meeting at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 on Thursday, December 5, 2024 at 3:30 PM Tokyo time.

“Vulkan 1.4 brings industry-wide implementations to greater feature parity, requiring several features that AMD hardware has supported since Vulkan 1.0, as well as a number of newer features from the Vulkan 2022 and 2024 milestones that will help improve the developer experience.” AMD intends to support Vulkan 1.4 in our AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition driver release early next year,” Andrej Zdravkovic, senior vice president and chief software officer at AMD, said in a statement.

“Vulcan 1.4 makes it easier for developers to create and deploy GPU-accelerated applications,” Thiru Sinnathambi, vice president of software engineering at Nvidia, said in a statement. “Today, NVIDIA is shipping compliant drivers with support for Vulkan 1.4 plus full Roadmap 2024 functionality for Windows 10, Windows 11 and Linux, all supported by our updated Nsight Graphics tools.”