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posted by CoolHand on Thursday March 08 2018, @08:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-quite-as-good-as-Vulcan dept.

Vulkan 1.1 Specification Released: Open-source Tools, SDKs, and Launch Driver Support

Since the release of Vulkan 1.0 in February 2016, the successor to OpenGL slowly but surely made its way into applications and game engines. Today, roughly two years later, the Khronos Group is releasing Vulkan 1.1 and SPIR-V 1.3 specifications, and much like Vulkan 1.0's 'hard' API launch these are accompanied by updated developer tools, open source conformance tests, and launch driver support from GPU vendors. [...] In sum, the evolution of Vulkan from 1.0 to 1.1 is three-pronged: integration of developer-requested functionalities, driver support and seamless porting of Vulkan to more platforms, and then practical implementation by way of a developed ecosystem.

Moving straight into the core changes, Vulkan 1.1 brings two new wide-ranging functionalities: protected content and subgroup operations. The former utilizes low-level restrictions such that applications can render and display using resources they cannot access or copy, in turn securing playback and display of protected content. While ostensibly for DRM purposes, Khronos noted that Vulkan was exposing GPU capability rather than pushing for hardware-level DRM, leaving usage or implementation up to the developers.

So on the one hand, developers may choose to create a highly-restrictive multi-layered DRM scheme with a high degree of granularity. On the other hand, perhaps the feature could be used for an advanced low-level adblocker, not only for browsers but one that could hook onto ad-serving mobile and desktop games and applications. All might be possible with Vulkan 1.1 and beyond. To that end, Vulkan is in many ways simply looking to enable what is possible – in the purest sense of the idea – on GPUs.

That idea carries over with the new 'subgroup operations', where a set of threads can communicate and coordinate amongst themselves where normally this would be done by accessing off-chip memory. Ultimately, this offers developers a method of parallelizing certain workloads to a very high degree, and while compute and deep learning are the more obvious use cases, subgroup operations are not limited to only compute shaders and could presumably be used for graphical purposes. Naturally, the new SPIR-V 1.3 likewise supports subgroup operations.

Khronos Group press release and Vulkan Resource Page.

SPIR: "Standard Portable Intermediate Representation"

Previously: Khronos Group Releases Vulkan 1.0 Graphics Specification

Related: Open Source Doom 3 BFG Gets a Vulkan Renderer
AMD Finally Pushing Out Open-Source Vulkan Driver


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @07:48PM (#649655)

    With DRM disabled. But none of the big players are willing to provide for that market.

    Instead we'd need to crowdfund and bootstrap it from scratch, while also designing to avoid any patents newer than 1998.

    Sadly there have only been a half dozen initiatives I have heard of that even attempted this in the past 15 years, and only two current ongoing ones that might succeed... Ny-something and the one based off the AMD architecture (VLIW4?5? GCN1.0?) Both FPGA proven and both with llvm compiler support. Not sure if the former avoids modern gpu patents or not, but the only other alternative if it was still available on the market, would be the epiphany chips, but the 2nd iteraction of them returned to closed source along with the newer toolchains and appears marketed solely to the DoD and related parties :(

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