Khronos Announces the Vulkan 1.4 Graphics API

[btarunr]

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:

• 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.

"Vulkan 1.4 is a milestone release that directly brings long-requested features and proven extensions into the core standard. By mandating these capabilities, we are enhancing Vulkan's flexibility and performance across a wider range of devices, making it easier for developers to create cutting-edge applications with confidence that they will run reliably on any platform," said Ralph Potter, newly elected Vulkan Working Group Chair.

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[ZoneDymo]

Havent heard anything about Vulkan in a long time, good stuff to see they are still improving.
(very much possible that a lot games use it and I am just oblivious)

 

[windwhirl]

al lang niets meer gehoord van Vulkan

Wrong site?

 

[phints]

Huge W for graphics with Vulkan 1.4. Imagine the frames id Tech 8 could be pushing with this for example, but until then I'll have to stick with 4,000 fps in vkQuake

 

[Legacy-ZA]

I wish more developers would use Vulkan, who needs X3D CPU's then?

 

[Battler624]

Pretty terrific, but do they mean all extensions for 1.3 are now core in 1.4? because those extensions caused fragmentation unfortunately.

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.

 

[Easy Rhino]

We must break these M$ chains!

 

[ObscureAngelPT]

Vulkan is barely used on Windows.
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.

 

[Nhonho]

I think there must be some dirty money that makes game developers tied to DX.

It's shameful.

 

[Zubasa]

I wish more developers would use Vulkan, who needs X3D CPU's then?

The API is the least of the issue for modern game engines. The standard UE5 slop will run just as bad on vulkan compare to DX12.

 

[Tomorrow]

I think there must be some dirty money that makes game developers tied to DX.

It's shameful.

As i understand it most developers dont use Vulkan because they dont have experience, time or the intention of porting the game to other OS's (likely all of these reasons) dealing with low level API's. Only established developers like ID Tech have to knowhow to try utilize Vulkan to it's fullest. That being said DX12 also started as low level but most developers on windows do seem to use it so maybe im mistaken about the experience with low level API's.

 

[R-T-B]

As i understand it most developers dont use Vulkan because they dont have experience, time or the intention of porting the game to other OS's (likely all of these reasons) dealing with low level API's. Only established developers like ID Tech have to knowhow to try utilize Vulkan to it's fullest. That being said DX12 also started as low level but most developers on windows do seem to use it so maybe im mistaken about the experience with low level API's.

Most developers use prepackaged engines and don't give a shit about the API, honestly.

DX12 also started as low level

It still is.

 

[gerard.bow]

On the Webside ist still the
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 ;-)

 

[NoneRain]

Nice.

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..