With the release of Vulkan 1.3.296 (change log), the new Device-Generated Commands extension makes it possible to prepare sequences of commands to run directly from the GPU, and executing those sequences directly without any data going through the CPU. Igalia’s Ricardo Garcia penned a blog detailing this new extension.

The FFmpeg multimedia library continues to enhance its support around the Vulkan Video APIs with the latest commits seeing H.264 and H.265/HEVC Vulkan encode support merged.

Microsoft’s Direct3D and HLSL teams shared some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released, DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V. Their HLSL team is committed to open development processes and are collaborating with The Khronos Group and LLVM Project. They’re sharing this information at the beginning of their multi-year development process for transparency about this transition from the start. Microsoft is working with the Khronos SPIR and Vulkan Working Groups to ensure that this transition benefits the whole development ecosystem.

Initial PanVK support for V10 GPUs has landed upstream in Mesa’s main branch. It’s now possible to start kicking the tires on Vulkan with an opensource driver on Arm Mali-G610 and Mali-G310 GPUs.

SIGGRAPH is one of the world’s most significant and long-standing conferences focused on computer graphics and interactive techniques. For the Khronos Group, SIGGRAPH represents an essential opportunity to connect with the developers, engineers, artists, and technical professionals that make up the primary users of Khronos standards like ANARI, glTF, OpenXR, WebGL, and Vulkan. Through Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, presentations, networking events, and face-to-face member meetings at SIGGRAPH, Khronos shares new and forthcoming technical breakthroughs, gathers feedback, learns about user needs and promotes best practices. This year, Khronos hosted nine public-facing events over four days: Presentation materials and video recordings for these events are now available on the Khronos SIGGRAPH 2024 Event Page.

Given that more developers were interested in creating applications for the growing number of Windows 11 ARM-based machines, last month LunarG released a Vulkan SDK for Windows 11 ARM64 architectures as a public Beta.

The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension, enabling direct retrieval of binary data associated with individual pipelines, bypassing the VkPipelineCache mechanism, and enabling applications to explicitly manage pipeline caching. Applications that do not need the advanced functionality of the new VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension can continue to use VkPipelineCache objects for their simplicity and optimized implementation. But developers that are not satisfied with the VkPipelineCache API should read on to learn more about this powerful new approach.

On June 21, 2024 the Vulkan SC working group at the Khronos Group released the Vulkan SC 1.0.15 specification, the latest maintenance update to the “Vulkan Safety Critical” open standard API, which enables GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in systems that are certified to meet industry functional safety standards. This blog post is on the latest Vulkan SC developments, including significant new functionality in the Vulkan SC validation layers and broadened availability of NVIDIA Vulkan SC drivers.

The Broadcom V3DV driver living within the Mesa code-base that provides Vulkan API support most notably for Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers now advertises Vulkan 1.3 and has been successfully tested on both the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 boards.

The open-source Intel “ANV” Vulkan driver within Mesa is now more capable for its Vulkan Video support with the H.264 and H.265 encode support now wired up for Mesa 24.3.