Today LunarG released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.3.204 that include Vulkan 1.3 support, Vulkan Profiles tooling solution, improved validation layer performance for multi-threaded applications, and several new extensions. The prior SDK supported Vulkan header 1.2.198. Read on for more information.
The new SDKs are available on the Vulkan SDK Download site. Grab them here.
New Features Added
- Vulkan 1.3 support. To query extensions available to a given physical device, call vkEnumerateDeviceExtensionProperties() or run vulkaninfo.
- A Vulkan Profiles tooling solution that allows application developers to generate their own app-specific feature profiles, easily detect whether a device supports a given profile, and enable the features/extensions in a profile at application startup. The tooling is beta quality with this SDK release. Read the Profiles documentation included with the SDK for more information.
- Improved validation layer performance for multi-threaded applications. This performance improvement is disabled by default and can be enabled via the Vulkan Configurator (vkconfig). In future releases, this validation layer performance improvement will be on by default. See the Validation Layer Fine Grain Locking documentation for more details.
List of New Extensions
Note that extensions are optional and may not be implemented by the underlying driver/ICD. Applications can now query for the presence of these new features:
- VK_GOOGLE_surfaceless_query
- VK_NV_linear_color_attachment
- VK_QCOM_fragment_density_map_offset
- VK_ARM_rasterization_order_attachment_access
- VK_EXT_depth_clip_control
- VK_EXT_image_view_min_lod
macOS Updates
In addition to the updates listed above, the macOS SDK now supports MoltenVK version 1.1.7. Please see the release notes for the list of highlights.
For More Details about the SDKs
For additional details, please read the Release Notes for Linux, Release Notes for Windows, or Release Notes for macOS.
For More Information
LunarG software engineering experts create innovative products and services for open source and commercial customers using leading-edge 3D graphics and compute technologies, including Vulkan, SPIR-V, OpenXR, and OpenGL. We have strengths in performance analysis and tuning, runtime and tools development, shader optimizations, driver development, and porting engines and applications to Vulkan.
For more information about LunarG, please check out our LunarG.com website.
