Vulkan News Archives

Ape is a new open-source Vulkan driver written in the Zig programming language and not dependent upon any Mesa code.

After three weeks without any Vulkan API spec updates, Vulkan 1.4.353 was released today to deliver the latest documentation updates for this high performance graphics/compute API as well as introducing three new extensions.

Vulkan 1.4.352 is out today as the latest minor spec update to this Khronos API. Besides just a few fixes/clarifications, there is one new extension and that is a NVIDIA vendor extension for cooperative matrix decode vector support.

Quietly sneaking out at the end of last week was Vulkan 1.4.351 as the newest spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API.

D7VK continues advancing for this Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 that also supports D3D 6 / 5 / 3 APIs too for vintage games ultimately rendered using the modern Vulkan API.

Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API.

Vulkan 1.4.350 released earlier today as the newest routine spec update. Beyond the usual minor fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.350 tacks on three more extensions.

Vulkan 1.4.349 is out today as a small update to the Vulkan API specification that incorporates various fixes that accumulated over the past week. Plus there is one new extension.

Vulkan 1.4.348 released this morning as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.348 comes four new extensions.

Vulkan 1.4.347 made its debut overnight as the latest routine update to this high performance graphics and compute API. Beyond the usual maintenance churn over the past week, Vulkan 1.4.347 brings three new extensions.

Vulkan 1.4.346 was published today with one big new extension in tow: VK_KHR_device_address_commands.

Vulkan 1.4.345 released overnight as the latest routine spec update to this graphics and compute API. There is one new extension besides a handful of different clarifications and corrections to various elements of the spec.

Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers.

Following last week's Vulkan spec updates that brought descriptor heaps and other notable new extensions and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone, Vulkan 1.4.342 was published this morning as the latest routine spec update plus one new extension.

The Vulkan EXT_present_timing was in development for years to help avoid game stuttering and released this past November with Vulkan 1.4.335. This significant extension as of today has been wired up in Mesa 26.1-devel for the key Vulkan drivers and working on both X11 and Wayland.

In addition to the release today of Vulkan 1.4.340 with the new descriptor heap "VK_EXT_descriptor_heap" extension and three other new extensions, The Khronos Group's Vulkan Working Group has also published the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone.

Vulkan 1.4.340 is out today as the first significant new Vulkan API update following the end of year holidays. With Vulkan 1.4.340 comes four new extensions worth talking about.

Vulkan 1.4.337 released a short time ago as what could be the last Vulkan API spec update of 2025 depending upon how much time the working group takes off or not around the holidays. In any case, it's a nice holiday treat with the new VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d and VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extensions.

Vulkan 1.4.336 is out today as the first spec update in two weeks for this high performance graphics and compute API.

Vulkan 1.4.335 released a few hours ago as the latest iteration of this high performance graphics and compute API. With being just a week since the prior update and given the US Thanksgiving week, it's on the lighter side in terms of issues addressed. There is one new extension though and it's a big one: VK_EXT_present_timing is finally merged.

NVIDIA engineers are interested in helping Google bring Vulkan Video accelerated GPU video decoding to the Chrome/Chromium web browser.

Last week's Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering "SER" is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance.

Vulkan 1.4.333 is out with a handful of fixes plus two new extensions.

Vulkan 1.4.332 is out today as the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics and compute API specification. Besides a number of documentation clarifications/corrections, there is one new extension this week in the name of AI / machine learning.

Over the summer months LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan-on-Metal implementation for Apple devices and built around Mesa. That alternative to MoltenVK was upstreamed for next quarter's Mesa 26.0 release and now it's also celebrating being an officially Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation.

Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.330 brought five new extensions, Vulkan 1.4.331 is now available with another two new extensions for this high performance graphics and compute API.

Vulkan 1.4.330 is out today with a few specification corrections/clarifications plus five new extensions.

Vulkan 1.4.329 is now available with one notable new extension in tow.

Blender 5.0 is working its way toward an official release in mid-November and is soon transitioning from its alpha to beta stage. Among the key changes with Blender 5.0 are its Vulkan renderer being in good shape overall, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other enhancements. Today some brief details were shared around the current state of the Vulkan support for Blender 5.0.

Vulkan 1.4.328 is now available as the latest specification update to this high performance graphics and compute API from The Khronos Group.

Version 1.4.327 of the Vulkan API specification was released on Friday and with it comes one new extension, which is a Valve vendor extension.

MoltenVK 1.4 is available today for this Vulkan portability implementation that layers the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal graphics drivers for allowing Vulkan games/apps to run across macOS, iOS, and tvOS devices.

Vulkan 1.4.325 was released on Friday with one new extension in tow: VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers for untyped pointers.

Vulkan 1.4.324 is out today as the first Vulkan API specification update in two weeks with a variety of clarifications/corrections plus a new extension from AMD.

The Vulkan working group is celebrating the US Independence Day with graphics API independence in today publishing Vulkan 1.4.321 that comes with several new extensions.

Just one week after Vulkan 1.4.318 was introduced with a new Valve extension, Vulkan 1.4.319 released this morning with another new extension.

Just one week past the notable Vulkan 1.4.317 release, Vulkan 1.4.318 is out with some documentation clarifications plus two new extensions.

Introduced last week with Vulkan 1.4.317 was Vulkan Video support for VP9 video decoding. Following that the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver landed its VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 support and now similarly the open-source Intel Vulkan driver has too.

Following the release of Vulkan 1.4.317 back on Friday that brought the long-awaited VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 extension for VP9 codec support for Vulkan Video, the Mesa RADV driver is now the first prominent open-source Vulkan driver merging support for VP9 decode.

Vulkan 1.4.317 was made public on Friday with a number of exciting new extensions, including VP9 video decoding for Vulkan Video, 8-bit floating-point data type support, and other additions.

FFmpeg developers have been working on Vulkan-accelerated FFV1 video encode/decode for that two decade old lossless video coding format. Merged this week to FFmpeg Git were more enhancements to their Vulkan-based FFV1 encoder and yielding big performance improvements for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors.

Released last week was the Vulkan 1.4.315 spec update and with it comes the new VK_EXT_zero_initialize_device_memory extension for allowing device memory allocations to be zero-initialized.

Vulkan 1.4.314 is now available as the newest routine spec update for this high performance GPU graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.314 there are more early preparations toward Vulkan Roadmap 2026 in aiming for a baseline of high-end smartphones, computers, and more for next year.

The MoltenVK 1.3 release candidate didn't end up needing much baking and overnight the MoltenVK 1.3 stable release was issued for Vulkan 1.3 API support on Apple devices that is built atop Apple's Metal drivers.

MoltenVK 1.3-rc1 was released today as the first test release of this updated Apple iOS / macOS / tvOS / visionOS layer that implements the Vulkan API atop the Apple Metal drivers. With MoltenVK 1.3 there is Vulkan API 1.3 support finally in tow.

Vulkan 1.4.312 is out today as the newest routine spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API. In addition to the usual mundane clarifications and fixes, this update brings two new extensions from Qualcomm and NVIDIA.

The Vulkan 1.4.311 specification update is out today with a handful of issues resolved with various clarifications and other subtle refinements. Plus two new extensions.

At the Vulkanised 2025 conference a few weeks back in Cambridge (UK) there were a few presentations concerning Vulkan Video for this cross-vendor, cross-platform video encode/decode interface.

With the release of Blender 4.3 last November an experimental Vulkan back-end was added and it continues to be improved upon for modernizing this 3D creation suite for digital artists and serving a variety of other purposes. The upcoming Blender 4.4 release will further refine the Vulkan support while later in the year it should be reaching production readiness.