NVIDIA released a fresh developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver with support for more extensions and a little performance work included. The NVIDIA driver now supports:
The driver also improves the performance of vkCmdMultiDraw*IndirectCount on Pascal and earlier GPUs (Source: Gaming On Linux).
NVIDIA has added support for profiling applications that make use of Vulkan and OpenGL interoperability. Nsight Graphics 2020.1 is now available for download, and adds new support for 3 Vulkan extensions:
AMD has released their Vulkan 1.2 driver as part of the official Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.1.2. Vulkan 1.2, released on January 15, 2020, is a large update which promoted many extensions into the core API. You can download the latest Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition here.
NVIDIA has released the updated Vulkan Drivers for Windows 436.52, Linux 435.27.00. With this release arrives support for two new extensions: VK_KHR_shader_clock and VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore.
AMD released a new version of their graphics driver v19.6.2 on Monday June 17th. With with release they have added support for 5 new Vulkan extensions: VK_EXT_full_screen_exclusive, VK_EXT_host_query_reset, VK_EXT_separate_stencil_usage, VK_KHR_uniform_buffer_standard_layout and VK_AMD_display_native_hdr. Learn more with a brief description of what each extension does and how to use them on the GPUOpen blog.
The latest update of the AMDVLK Open Source Vulkan driver sees several notable additions. The driver now officially supports VK_EXT_host_query_reset, VK_EXT_separate_stencil_usage, and VK_KHR_uniform_buffer_standard_layout extensions and updates the Vulkan API headers against version 1.1.108. Read more about this update at Phoronix or download the driver on GitHub.
Intel has released their 26.20.100.6861 graphics drivers. OpenGL has been bumped to 4.6, which adds an extension to use Vulkan’s SPIR-V shaders in OpenGL. Vulkan has been given four new extensions: VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable, VK_EXT_host_query_reset, VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout, and VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8. The OpenCL kernel compile times have been reduced.
NVIDIA Tech Blog: Learn more about machine learning acceleration in Vulkan with cooperative matrices by NVIDIA experts. If the Cooperative Matrix Vulkan extension is interesting to you, you can try it out right now! It is shipping for Turing-based GPUs in NVIDIA driver versions 419.09 (Windows) and 418.31.03 (Linux). Links to all the relevant specifications are here.
Yesterday AMD developers did their first AMDVLK open-source push of 2019. That first update in nearly a month updated against the Vulkan 1.1.96 headers, added GPU memory references to software compositing images, clean-ups for the barrier handling, various PAL and LLPC fixes, and other changes. Based upon that source code state from yesterday, an Ubuntu Debian package is now available of just the Vulkan driver and validated for at least 16.04/18.04 installations but should end up working too for e.g. 18.10. Read the entire story on Phoronix.
NVIDIA has released the new VRWorks Graphics SDK V3.0 for application and headset developers along with the NVIDIA display driver 411.63, both updated for NVIDIA’s new Turing GPU generation. The drivers are available for download and the SDK has been posted. The SDK includes an OpenGL sample to demonstrate Turing’s “Variable Rate Shading” (VRS) feature showing how to vary fragment load across the screen, e.g. for foveated rendering. Another sample demonstrates Turing’s “Multi-View Rendering” (MVR) feature by showing how to render the same scene from different viewpoints. There are Vulkan versions of the samples too.
Intel’s driver team has published a new graphics driver for all recent GPUs (Intel 6th, 7th and 8th Gen processors) on Windows 10. This driver version exposes Vulkan 1.1.82, and continues to support OpenGL 4.5, exposing the same OpenGL support as v4944 (245 OpenGL extensions). Direct download from Intel is here.
Intel announces the Windows Graphics Driver Version 24.20.100.6025. Included in this update is support for Vulkan 1.1. Platforms include 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core processor family as well as Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake.
Khronos announced the conformance program for OpenGL 4.6 and Intel has successfully passed conformance tests for its GPU models for the Mesa Linux driver. For specifics on the conformant hardware you can check the list of conformant OpenGL products at the Khronos website. Learn more about these drivers and the OpenGL conformance tests and why they are important to you.
