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Vulkan 1.1 Specification Released

Accepted submission by takyon at 2018-03-07 20:16:09
Software

Vulkan 1.1 Specification Released: Open-source Tools, SDKs, and Launch Driver Support [anandtech.com]

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 [khronos.org] and Vulkan Resource Page [khronos.org].

Previously: Khronos Group Releases Vulkan 1.0 Graphics Specification [soylentnews.org]

Related: Open Source Doom 3 BFG Gets a Vulkan Renderer [soylentnews.org]
AMD Finally Pushing Out Open-Source Vulkan Driver [soylentnews.org]


Original Submission