Khronos Group Releases Vulkan 1.1

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/07/2018 03:26 PM | source: | 12 comment(s)

The Khronos Group announces the release of the Vulkan 1.1 and SPIR-V 1.3 specifications. Version 1.1 expands Vulkan’s core functionality with developer-requested features, such as subgroup operations, while integrating a wide range of proven extensions from Vulkan 1.0.

Khronos will also release full Vulkan 1.1 conformance tests into open source and AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA and Qualcomm have implemented conformant Vulkan 1.1 drivers.

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Vulkan 1.1 will drive increased industry momentum for this new-generation, cross-platform standard for explicit control over GPU acceleration. Vulkan now ships natively on almost all GPU-enabled platforms, including Windows 7, 8.X, 10, Android 7.0+ and Linux, plus Khronos recently announced open source tools to enable Vulkan 1.0 applications to be ported to macOS and iOS.

Beaverton, OR – March 7, 2018 – The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the release of the Vulkan® 1.1 and SPIR-V™ 1.3 specifications. Version 1.1 expands Vulkan’s core functionality with developer-requested features, such as subgroup operations, while integrating a wide range of proven extensions from Vulkan 1.0. Khronos will also release full Vulkan 1.1 conformance tests into open source and AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA and Qualcomm have implemented conformant Vulkan 1.1 drivers. Find more information on the Vulkan 1.1 specification and associated tests and tools at Khronos’s Vulkan Resource Page.

“With enhanced developer tools, rigorous conformance testing and the public Vulkan Ecosystem Forum, Khronos is delivering on its goal to develop a complete and vibrant Vulkan ecosystem,” said Tom Olson, distinguished engineer at Arm, and Vulkan Working Group chair. “Vulkan 1.1 is a response to prioritized industry requests and shows our commitment to delivering a functional roadmap driven by developer needs.”

Vulkan 1.1 will drive increased industry momentum for this new-generation, cross-platform standard for explicit control over GPU acceleration. Vulkan now ships natively on almost all GPU-enabled platforms, including Windows 7, 8.X, 10, Android 7.0+ and Linux, plus Khronos recently announced open source tools to enable Vulkan 1.0 applications to be ported to macOS and iOS. Vulkan has widespread support in leading games engines including Unreal, Unity, Source 2 from Valve, id Tech, CroTeam’s Serious Engine, CryEngine, and Xenko. Vulkan is being used in over 30 cutting-edge games on diverse desktop and mobile platforms, including Doom, Quake, Roblox, The Talos Principle, Dota 2, and is the exclusive API used in AAA titles such as Wolfenstein II and Doom VFR.

New functionality in Vulkan 1.1 includes Subgroup Operations that enable highly-efficient sharing and manipulation of data between multiple tasks running in parallel on a GPU. Vulkan 1.1 also enables applications to perform rendering and display operations using resources that they cannot access or copy - for secure playback and display of protected multimedia content.

In addition, a wide range of Vulkan 1.0 extensions have been integrated, bringing significant proven functionality into core Vulkan 1.1, including: simultaneous rendering of multiple image views, use of multiple GPUs in a single system, and cross-process API interoperability for advanced rendering and compositing operations often used in demanding applications such as Virtual Reality. These core functionalities also include advanced compute with 16-bit memory access, and support for HLSL memory layouts, and display, processing and compositing of video streams, through direct sampling of YCbCr color formatted textures produced by many video codecs.

Integral to the release of Vulkan 1.1 is the new SPIR-V 1.3 specification that expands the capabilities of the Vulkan shader intermediate representation to support subgroup operations and enable enhanced compiler optimizations. The SPIR-V tools ecosystem continues to gain significant momentum with front-end compilers for both GLSL and HLSL, and to expand low-level tooling support from the open source SPIRV-Tools project.

“We are excited to see the progress developers have made with the SPIR-V standardized IR. Developers are using the shader language of their choice and a variety of open source compilers to ship their games and applications. The Vulkan tools and ecosystem is evolving rapidly.” said David Neto, shader compiler team lead at Google and SPIR working group chair.

Open source Vulkan development tools continue to evolve alongside the specification. For example, the LunarG Vulkan SDK and tools layers have been upgraded to support Vulkan 1.1, including the Vulkan Layer Factory (VLF) to enable rapid layer development, the Device Simulation Layer to simulate target device capabilities, without requiring actual physical hardware and the new Assistant Layer to guide developers to best practices and to highlight potential application problems. In addition, the RenderDoc frame capture and introspection debugging tool has added full native Vulkan support on Android with help from Khronos members, and improved support for displaying SPIR-V disassembly using SPIRV-Tools and high-level languages through the SPIRV-Cross cross compiler. RenderDoc has also been upgraded to expose native disassembly and profiling information for vendors who support it, and to support the external memory features that now form a core part of Vulkan 1.1.

To encourage the collaborative evolution of the Vulkan ecosystem, Khronos has created the public Vulkan Ecosystem Forum to share issues and opportunities, and to coordinate cooperative solutions. The aim of the Forum is to respond to developer feedback and foster cross-functional discussions and engagement between users, tools developers and API designers. Join the conversation at Vulkan Ecosystem on GitHub.

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Rambo
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#5526157 Posted on: 03/07/2018 04:08 PM

I'm noob so I want to ask. Will this change something for existing games?

schmidtbag
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#5526177 Posted on: 03/07/2018 04:46 PM

I'm noob so I want to ask. Will this change something for existing games?

That depends. If the only thing you do is update Vulkan and drivers, then no, you're probably not going to see any difference. If the games are updated to utilize the new features, then yes, you might see a difference.

I could've sworn Vulkan 1.0 was already capable of simultaneous processing on mismatched GPUs, but, maybe 1.1 has the potential to allow users to toggle this even on unsupported software, much like how you could force Crossfire or SLI to run on unsupported software. Obviously that doesn't mean your games will be optimized to run on, for example, an Intel IGP with a GTX 1080 (I'm sure you'd get horrible microstuttering, or should I say, macrostuttering), but it's interesting to think about such potential features. Anyway, my point is if something like this were to be done, that could in theory apply to existing games, since this is handled at the OS and driver level.

JonasBeckman
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#5526195 Posted on: 03/07/2018 05:13 PM

I'm noob so I want to ask. Will this change something for existing games?

https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/sdk/1.1.70.0/windows/release-notes.html

The installed runtime or loader program has a few bug fixes in addition to support for the new 1.1 features but for games I don't think any current released title will see a update to the new SDK, emulators might in time as AMD and NVIDIA get stable drivers out that support it though and of course upcoming Vulkan games and game engines such as Unity, Unreal and Cry engine.

Fixed Vulkan-LoaderAndValidationLayers Github Issues:

#2410 vkGetSwapchainImagesKHR called more than once, returns another handle (ID)s bug
#2403 Presence of ICD json causes loader errors when loading layers loader question
#2379 vulkaninfo doesn't give anything useful when DISPLAY is not set
#2360 Validate descriptor set flags for vkCmdPushDescriptorSetKHR incomplete
#2289 Missing validation: Transitioning an image before binding memory to it is illegal incomplete
#2213 VL reports too early when recording secondary command buffer bug
#1600 SC layer: GS output to FS input not taken into account (refs VS instead)

Rich_Guy
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#5526297 Posted on: 03/07/2018 09:48 PM

AMDs 18.2.3 drivers got re-released with it added

RooiKreef
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#5526461 Posted on: 03/08/2018 09:20 AM

From my experience with Vulkan, I can without a doubt say that by playing a game that supports the Vulkan api this will allow you to stretch old hardware alot longer than what any DX can ever do. I still don't know why developers don't use this api more often? Maybe it's a lack of knowledge of how to use it or maybe Microsoft is paying royalties to use the DX api??? No one will truly know, but man go and play a game that supports the Vulkan api then you will kno what I mean. I have seen improvements of 30% + in certain games. However I have not seen actual image quality comparisons between DX and Vulkan on a like for like basis. But I do know one thing and that is if you run a game with the Vilkan api then every last drop of your performance is sucked out of your pc to make the game run as smooth as possible.
Really I will advise anyone that haven't tried a game with the Vulkan api yet to install something like Doom and test it a bit. It amazes me every time to see what better optimized code does to actual performance.
Those peeps at Khronos deserve a lot more respect than what they currently get.

GamerNerves
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#5526469 Posted on: 03/08/2018 09:34 AM

fantaskarsef
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#5526471 Posted on: 03/08/2018 09:36 AM

I still wonder why DX12 is still so slowly adopted, since to my understanding, it offers very similiar features to Vulkan in the end.

I guess because it's locked to Win10 probably? Vulkan is not locked to a single platform actually, or is it? I'd rather see Vulkan on the rise than dx12, but that's just my opinion.

GamerNerves
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#5526476 Posted on: 03/08/2018 10:02 AM

I guess because it's locked to Win10 probably? Vulkan is not locked to a single platform actually, or is it? I'd rather see Vulkan on the rise than dx12, but that's just my opinion.

Yes, that is a very likely reason. In a case of emergency though, Microsoft can just update Windows 7 to support DX12.

fantaskarsef
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#5526481 Posted on: 03/08/2018 10:13 AM

Yes, that is a very likely reason. In a case of emergency though, Microsoft can just update Windows 7 to support DX12.

While I guess you might be right, I'd like to see that emergency

TheDeeGee
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#5526554 Posted on: 03/08/2018 04:45 PM

I wish developers wern't lazy and implented vulkan in all their games.

But making a half assed console port is easier money i guess.

JonasBeckman
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#5526562 Posted on: 03/08/2018 05:20 PM

Some Linux ports also gets Vulkan now over OGL though the Windows versions usually remains on DirectX, and sometimes with the DRM still in place too heh.
Mad Max for example though in it's favor it's really well optimized for both AMD and NVIDIA.

waltc3
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#5526586 Posted on: 03/08/2018 06:27 PM

@RooiKreef I'm quite sure that DirectX is popular because it is very well documented and supported by Microsoft and other users. What Khronos is doing now is trying to emulate the same way of partnership with companies and support for developers that Microsoft did long ago, or so I assume they did.

I'm happy that this is happening and owners of AMD's GCN-cards are probably too. The possible gains for those cards are immense compared to DX11.

I still wonder why DX12 is still so slowly adopted, since to my understanding, it offers very similiar features to Vulkan in the end.

Absolutely correct on why DX (d3d) is the hands-down developer-preferred API--it's tools, and then it's more tools and lots of developer support from Microsoft for d3d. Nobody does that better, imo. The old OpenGL ARB group was contentious--IHVs and devs in constant disagreement (picking "sides", etc.) and wanting to develop custom extensions the other guy(s) didn't have, etc.--ARB progressed with the speed of a glacier in those days, accordingly. ARB/OpenGL predictably went the way of extinct birds, and then out of the ashes Kronos & Vulkan are born.

Don't forget that Vulkan is as slowly adopted as DX12 currently. But neither is actually "slow" when it comes to widespread adoption. People have short memories when it comes to how long DX9.0c (shipped in 2002--the "c" version) remained current, and how *long* it took game developers to fully support everything it had to offer and to ship games that *required* DX9.0c (instead of merely "supported it" with a couple of features optional to the game engine, etc.) Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15 years, IIRC, for DX9 to hit its maximum stride--DX9.0c games were still shipping in 2015/16, and may still be shipping, I'm sure. DX11 is only now beginning to accrue significant developer interest. DX12 is a brand new API which developers have to learn how to build their game engines around--that's going to take awhile. (For instance, DX12 allows devs to directly implement multi-gpu support in their d3d12 game engines--doing away with the current situation of xFire/SLI not supported in in games through the API--but only through custom GPU driver support bolted on by the GPU IHVs--which is entirely why some games don't support it at all while other games support it poorly, etc.) Couple more years, at least, I would guess, before we begin seeing "DX12-required" game engines. But it's not unusual--game devs prefer to ship to the widest possible gaming audience, of course, which right now is neither Vulkan nor DX12, imo. Patience is advised...

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