Vulkan News

RedGamingTech's Paul sits down for this interview with Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett. They discuss a range of topics including Vulkan and the addition of Descriptor Heaps (which will be the new standard rather than the binding model), what the industry have decided around Work Graphs and work lists (especially because DX12 is pushing away from Work Graphs), Neural Rendering. Neural texture compression, RTX Mega Geometry, neural materials and how the rendering pipeline may change in the long term, including how APIs will evolve for both graphics and other technologies as hardware becomes more powerful and AI models handle more of the workloads in games.Other subjects include SLANG, Neural rendering and AI, glTF and OpenXR. While Virtual Reality hasn't been embraced so quickly by gamers, VR and Augmented Reality has its place in many other fields, and so technology such as OpenXR is going to be increasingly important.

NVIDIA has added support for VK_NV_low_latency revision 2, to enable out-of-the-box Proton support for NVIDIA Reflex in Vulkan-native games. In addition:  Fixed a bug which prevented VK_NV_low_latency2 from reducing latency on swapchains created from VK_KHR_wayland_surface and VK_KHR_display surfaces. Fixed multiple startup and alt-tab hangs that occurred with NVIDIA Smooth Motion enabled. Fixed a bug that caused a file descriptor leak when the Vulkan loader unloads libGLX_nvidia.so.0 after a call to vkDestroyInstance. Added support for the VK_EXT_cluster_acceleration_structure Vulkan extension.

Jagex's RuneScape launched an open beta of its Vulkan renderer on Windows on September 7, replacing OpenGL as the engine transitions for lower CPU overhead, better multi-threading, and improved streaming/loading performance. Android is next, with an eventual Vulkan-to-Metal translation layer for Apple platforms; OpenGL stays as a fallback for incompatible devices.

SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles delivered a clear snapshot of the future of graphics and spatial computing—and Khronos was at the center of it. The organization presented more than 20 sessions spanning hands-on courses and in-depth Birds of a Feather (BOF) discussions on neural graphics, XR, 3D assets, rendering, and real-time shading. Wednesday, July 22 served as the dedicated Khronos Developer Day, with status updates from the Vulkan, glTF, WebGL/WebGPU, OpenXR, ANARI, and Slang Working Groups, plus the Machine Learning Council, followed by a networking reception for members and guests. Click through for a full recap of activities. 

Highlights of SDK 1.4.357:• Major KosmicKrisp performance gains (up to ~2.35× faster) + full Vulkan 1.4 exposure on Apple platforms• 13 new extensions• Scoped GPU-AV + new GPU Dump tool in the Validation Layers• Available now for Linux, Windows & macOS

The Khronos Group today announced dates and venue for two co-located events in Kortrijk, Belgium: Vulkanised 2027 (February 8–10) and the Real-Time Shading Symposium 2027 (February 11–12). Both events will be hosted at Howest University of Applied Sciences' The Penta facility, with Howest serving as venue sponsor.

Vulkan is deprecating host-side ray tracing acceleration structure build commands in favor of a single, device-address-based path. This aligns Vulkan Ray Tracing with the direction of DirectX Raytracing, modern engine architecture, and hardware trends.In the six years since Vulkan Ray Tracing launched, the host-side path has seen limited adoption. Developers generally found it more cumbersome than helpful, while implementers had to maintain parallel host/GPU command models that increased complexity and created friction for future ray tracing API evolution.

Firefox is adding hardware-accelerated Vulkan Video decoding, saving Nvidia users on Linux the hassle of manually configuring the nvidia-vaapi-driver package. The change will be included in Firefox 153, out July 21, but it will not be enabled by default – not to start with. Instead, users will be able to flip a pair of preferences in about:config to try it out, with the awareness that there may be hiccups and edge cases (especially on devices with hybrid graphics, mentioned further down).Adding native Vulkan Video decoding path to its codebase means workarounds will no longer be required.

FFmpeg has introduces Vulkan-accelerated APV encoding to go alongside the earlier development of their Vulkan-accelerated decoding for the APV video format.

The new descriptor heap feature in Vulkan refactors resource binding from the ground up, addressing long-standing user feedback to streamline and bring greater parity to how it works in Direct3D 12 (D3D12). Descriptor heaps give direct control over descriptor memory management, are a better match for modern hardware, and simplify performance optimization of resource management. They’re especially useful for renderers using dynamic texture indexing, for complex ray tracing shaders, or when there is a shared backend supporting D3D12. This post highlights what descriptor heaps add, how they compare to descriptor sets, and how to get started.