Vulkan 1.4: A Deep Dive into the Latest Release
Dec 14, 2024Vulkan is a C99 API designed for explicit control of low-level graphics and compute functionality. It's an open, royalty-free graphics and compute API designed for high-efficiency,
Vulkan 1.4: A Deep Dive into the Latest Release
Vulkan is a C99 API designed for explicit control of low-level graphics and compute functionality. It's an open, royalty-free graphics and compute API designed for high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs. It is widely adopted in leading game engines, cutting-edge games, and high-performance applications. Vulkan is supported across a diverse range of devices, including Windows and Linux PCs, gaming consoles, cloud platforms, mobile phones, and embedded systems.
What's New in Vulkan 1.4?
Vulkan 1.4 represents a significant advancement, streamlining development and deployment of GPU-accelerated applications. Key improvements include:
1. Streaming Transfers:
Vulkan 1.4 introduces new implementation requirements to ensure portable, cross-platform applications can efficiently stream large data quantities to the device while simultaneously rendering at full performance. This addresses a long-standing challenge in earlier Vulkan versions. Implementations must support either the hostImageCopy
feature or an additional queue supporting VK_QUEUE_TRANSFER_BIT
. All queues supporting VK_QUEUE_GRAPHICS_BIT
or VK_QUEUE_COMPUTE_BIT
must also advertise VK_QUEUE_TRANSFER_BIT
.
2. Mandatory Extensions and Features:
Several previously optional extensions and features crucial for high-performance applications are now mandatory in Vulkan 1.4. This ensures consistent availability across platforms. These include:
- Push descriptors
- Dynamic rendering local reads
- Scalar block layouts
This standardization simplifies development and improves reliability.
3. Core Specification Enhancements:
Maintenance extensions up to and including VK_KHR_maintenance6
are now integrated into the core Vulkan 1.4 specification.
4. Enhanced Rendering Capabilities:
Vulkan 1.4 guarantees support for 8K rendering with up to eight separate render targets, along with several other limit increases. This signifies a substantial boost in rendering capabilities.
5. New Structures:
-
A new feature structure (
VkPhysicalDeviceVulkan14Features
) is introduced, encompassing features from extensions promoted to the core.bresenhamLines
andshaderSubgroupRotateClustered
are additionally required.pushDescriptor
is also a new required feature.pipelineProtectedAccess
is required only when theprotectedMemory
feature is supported. -
A new properties structure (
VkPhysicalDeviceVulkan14Properties
) is added, including properties from extensions promoted to the core. The newly addeddynamicRenderingLocalReadDepthStencilAttachments
anddynamicRenderingLocalReadMultisampledAttachments
properties are optional and control support for local reads of depth/stencil attachments and multisampled attachments in dynamic rendering.


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