Monday, December 2nd 2024
Khronos Announces the Vulkan 1.4 Graphics API
Today, the Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies dedicated to creating advanced interoperability standards, has announced the release of Vulkan 1.4, the latest version of its cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. Vulkan 1.4 integrates and mandates support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms.
"Vulkan 1.4 is a developer-driven update that enhances Vulkan's value as a stable, reliable framework for creating graphics-intensive applications on any platform," said Tom Olson, outgoing Vulkan Working Group Chair. "As I step down, I'm proud to see the groundwork we've laid through our roadmaps come to fruition. Our roadmap milestone plans have empowered developers with new levels of flexibility and performance, setting Vulkan on a path for continued innovation and broader adoption in the years to come."The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles, including:
The Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) is an extensive set of close to three million tests in open source that all Vulkan implementers must pass, increasing cross-platform consistency. AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Samsung all have development drivers that have passed Vulkan 1.4 Conformance. Additionally, Mesa open-source Linux drivers have passed Vulkan 1.4 conformance on AMD, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm hardware. Production drivers that have passed Khronos's formal conformance testing process are listed on the Vulkan Conformant Products register.
Vulkan's tooling ecosystem continues to grow, providing developers with powerful, community-driven tools that improve shader portability and performance. The Vulkan SDK from LunarG supports multiple shader languages, including HLSL, GLSL, and Slang—now a Khronos-hosted open-source project—enabling 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.
"Vulkan 1.4 is a developer-driven update that enhances Vulkan's value as a stable, reliable framework for creating graphics-intensive applications on any platform," said Tom Olson, outgoing Vulkan Working Group Chair. "As I step down, I'm proud to see the groundwork we've laid through our roadmaps come to fruition. Our roadmap milestone plans have empowered developers with new levels of flexibility and performance, setting Vulkan on a path for continued innovation and broader adoption in the years to come."The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles, including:
- Streaming Transfers: Vulkan 1.4 imposes new implementation requirements to ensure portable, cross-platform applications can stream large quantities of data to a device while simultaneously rendering at full performance.
- Previously optional extensions and features critical to emerging high-performance applications are now mandatory in Vulkan 1.4, ensuring their reliable availability across multiple platforms. These include push descriptors, dynamic rendering local reads, and scalar block layouts.
- Maintenance extensions up to and including VK_KHR_maintenance6 are now part of the core Vulkan 1.4 specification.
- 8K rendering with up to eight separate render targets is now guaranteed to be supported, along with several other limit increases.
The Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) is an extensive set of close to three million tests in open source that all Vulkan implementers must pass, increasing cross-platform consistency. AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Samsung all have development drivers that have passed Vulkan 1.4 Conformance. Additionally, Mesa open-source Linux drivers have passed Vulkan 1.4 conformance on AMD, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm hardware. Production drivers that have passed Khronos's formal conformance testing process are listed on the Vulkan Conformant Products register.
Vulkan's tooling ecosystem continues to grow, providing developers with powerful, community-driven tools that improve shader portability and performance. The Vulkan SDK from LunarG supports multiple shader languages, including HLSL, GLSL, and Slang—now a Khronos-hosted open-source project—enabling 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.
13 Comments on Khronos Announces the Vulkan 1.4 Graphics API
(very much possible that a lot games use it and I am just oblivious)
And another thing, so i went to vulkan conformant products page and noticed a few weird things.
AMD has 2 "undisclosed" products that are conformant to 1.4, probably 8800XT and 8700XT.
Samsung has an ARMv9 CPU/SoC?
Edit: Probably not all extensions are mandated for 1.4, as even the 750ti is conformant.
But anything outside of it it is widely used.
I've moved on to Linux a couple of months ago (still run a Windows copy on my main drive though, but always boot linux by default on other drive), and I still do game a bit. One thing I've noticed is how far Linux is from matching Windows performance when it comes to games, many games do run similar, sometimes better, but the majority can range from 10-20% worse to 40% worse in some cases in GPU Bound scenarios.
Each new Proton version/DXVK/VK3D, this gaps get smaller and better compatibility is delivered.
Vulkan 1.4 seems to be another step in the right direction if the compatibility layers can take advantage of some of the new features, altough stuff VK_KHR_maintenance6 was just added to the latest version of the DXVK even in Vulkan 1.3 which allows for saving VRAM, so in the end I'm not so sure how benefitial it will be when it comes to gaming while using compatibility layers.
Probably it will be much better used under Android.
It's shameful.
1.3.296.0 Runtime and SDK from 08-Oct-2024 available.
At least it's newer than what AMD supplies with its drivers, they use 1.3.292 in the 24Q4 driver.
Use the VulkanRT installer with trustedInstaller right you can overwrite the AMD driver data ;-)
It would be interesting to see an article comparing DX12 x Vulkan 1.4, what one has and the other hasn't, issues on dev side, games compatibility, etc..