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⇱ Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone: Variable Rate Shading, Host Image Copies & More - Phoronix


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Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone: Variable Rate Shading, Host Image Copies & More

Written by Michael Larabel in Vulkan on 23 January 2026 at 10:12 AM EST. 7 Comments
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.

The Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone represents the latest extensions and specification increases beyond the Vulkan 1.4 baseline and prior annual milestones.

The Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone now mandates drivers support additional features such as Variable Rate Shading "VRS" and other features including:

- Variable rate shading
- Shader clock queries
- Host image copies
- Compute shader derivatives
- Various swapchain improvements
- Higher descriptor and shader interface limits

The Vulkan Roadmap Milestones are intended for desktops, laptops, game consoles, mid-to-high-end smartphones, and other devices benefiting from the expanded feature set.

👁 Vulkan Roadmap 2026


The Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone can be found via docs.vulkan.org. More details on the Vulkan 2026 Milestone via today's announcement on Khronos.org.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.