Vulkan 1.4.311 Released With New Extension For BFloat16
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.
The first new extension of Vulkan 1.4.311 is VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset as an extension worked on by Valve engineers along with Qualcomm. In particular, Connor Abbott and Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team worked on VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset. With VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset an application can specify offsets to a fragment density map attachment to change the frame-buffer location where density values are applied without having to regenerate the fragment density map.
The other new extension to Vulkan 1.4.311 is quite interesting: VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16. Yes, this extension allows for Brain Float BF16 operations within shaders. VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 was worked on by AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, Google, Qualcomm, Imagination, and Intel engineers for allowing BFloat16 support within shaders in conjunction with the SPIR-V SPV_KHR_bfloat16 extension.
This Vulkan BF16 support with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 should be of benefit to the various Vulkan machine learning / AI initiatives taking place for newer GPUs that have native support for the BF16 data type.
More details on the Vulkan 1.4.311 changes via GitHub.
The first new extension of Vulkan 1.4.311 is VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset as an extension worked on by Valve engineers along with Qualcomm. In particular, Connor Abbott and Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team worked on VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset. With VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset an application can specify offsets to a fragment density map attachment to change the frame-buffer location where density values are applied without having to regenerate the fragment density map.
The other new extension to Vulkan 1.4.311 is quite interesting: VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16. Yes, this extension allows for Brain Float BF16 operations within shaders. VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 was worked on by AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, Google, Qualcomm, Imagination, and Intel engineers for allowing BFloat16 support within shaders in conjunction with the SPIR-V SPV_KHR_bfloat16 extension.
This Vulkan BF16 support with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 should be of benefit to the various Vulkan machine learning / AI initiatives taking place for newer GPUs that have native support for the BF16 data type.
More details on the Vulkan 1.4.311 changes via GitHub.