Android Graphics are planning their roadmap for Vulkan tooling for the next few years and would like to understand tooling needs directly from Vulkan developers. They primarily want to know what tools you’re using that you’re happy with (so that they can make sure they fund them to stay healthy) and what tooling gaps you see on Android so they can decide to fund development on them.

Meta has announced the release of a new open-source Intermediate Graphics Library (IGL). Meta is committed to build open standards for 3D graphics in partnership with the broader industry and the Khronos Group. After months of hard work and dedication, Meta is sharing their latest creation with the development community. IGL provides developers with a powerful set of tools for creating high-quality visuals and graphics in their applications. Whether a developer is working on a game, a 3D modeling application or any other project that requires top-notch graphics, IGL has you covered. This cross-platform library encapsulates common GPU functionality with a low-level cross-platform interface, abstracting Render Hardware Interface (RHI) with a modern approach. It supports various graphics APIs, such as OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL, and Vulkan, with a common interface. It’s lightweight and efficient, with minimal overhead on top of the underlying APIs, and has minimal dependencies on external libraries.

The Vulkan headers now include the following new extensions: VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_shader_object emulation layer (beta) VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_dynamic_state VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetc VK_EXT_shader_objec VK_EXT_shader_tile_imag VK_NV_displacement_micromap VK_KHR_map_memory2

On April 27, 2023 the Vulkan® Ray Tracing TSG released the VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch extension, which exposes the ability to fetch vertex positions from an acceleration structure hit when tracing rays. The SPIR-V SPV_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch and GLSL GL_EXT_ray_tracing_position_fetch extensions have also been released to provide SPIR-V and GLSL support for this functionality. The position of scene geometry is provided to ray tracing acceleration structures at build time and they include a derived form of the positions to enable efficient ray tracing and queries. Applications frequently require the position or a derived attribute of a triangle on a hit. For example, the geometric normal of the hit can be used as a biased ray origin for shadow rays in path tracers to prevent self intersection. The Ray Tracing Position Fetch extension enables direct retrieval of position and attribute information to avoid duplication of geometry data storage.

NVK, an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware that is part of Mesa, now supports the Vulkan extension, VK_KHR_Multiview. Multiview is a rendering technique originally designed for VR.

New features and improvements include: Update Khronos Vulkan Headers to 1.3.246 Support Navi3x floating point instructions Support extensions VK_KHR_map_memory2, VK_EXT_image_sliced_view_of_3d, VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state, VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state3, VK_EXT_shader_module_identifier, VK_EXT_mesh_shader, VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles, VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer

Intel’s open-source OpenGL “Iris” and Vulkan “ANV” Linux drivers are now part of the auto-generated set of drivers set to be built for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) when compiling this code inside Mesa.

The new NVIDIA Optical Flow SDK 5.0 now enables Vulkan applications to use the NVIDIA Optical Flow engine when running on NVIDIA Ampere architecture and newer generation GPUs to create a smoother gaming and video experience by inserting interpolated frames between original frames using the computed flow between frame pairs.

LunarG has summarized the results of their annual survey and created a report that shares the key findings and suggested actions to improve the Vulkan SDK and Ecosystem in 2023 and beyond.

Godot 4.0 runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and also Android devices. The Goldot team embedded OpenXR in the engine’s core and introduced Godot XR tools, which will help developers of XR projects. With two new Vulkan backends (Clustered and Mobile), Godot rendering has never been so advanced. While Godot is excited to leverage Vulkan for performance optimization going forward, it was very important not to penalize users with less powerful hardware. For that, they’ve integrated an OpenGL-based compatibility renderer aimed at supporting older and lower-end devices. As always, Godot wants to see people create games on the full spectrum of devices for everyone to enjoy. They’re also working on a Direct3D 12 renderer for better Windows and Xbox support. With Je06jm‘s contribution, you can now also take advantage of AMD’s Fidelity FX Super Resolution 1.0 (FSR 1.0) to dynamically and beautifully render at lower resolution while keeping your game running smoothly. Spoiler: Support for FSR 2.1 is planned in future releases.