Sascha Willems

Intro The Vulkan hardware database just got one of it’s biggest updates, bringing with it some fundamental changes, lots of optimizations and some quality-of-life improvements. The main reason behind this update were requests from inside the Khronos group, asking for feature coverage based reporting. What does Feature coverage mean? Up until now if you were looking for a specific extension and the devices (or reports) that supported it, the database would only tell you that a device would support the extension, with the driver version being reported just being the latest known version. [Read More]

Version 2.03 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.1.129, adding support for new extensions introduced with this header: VK_KHR_performance_query VK_KHR_separate_depth_stencil_layouts VK_KHR_buffer_device_address Aside from new support for these new extensions, this release also includes some small bugfixes related to surface extensions and adds a mapping for VK_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_TYPE_CPU. This is of interest for those that are using software Vulkan implementations like Swiftshader or gfxportability. [Read More]

It’s finally here. Khronos just made the Unified Vulkan Samples repository publicly available. For more details see the official press release. About The goal of this project is a central source for high-quality Vulkan samples, with contributions both from Khronos members as well as external contributors like me. It also comes with an extensive framework that takes care of platform-related stuff like window and input handling and offers functionality for loading assets like glTF models, shaders, etc. [Read More]

Version 2.02 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.1.124, adding support for all new extensions introduced with this header: VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore VK_KHR_shader_clock The reasons behind this new release just 3 days after the last one is the new new VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore extension, one that people have been anticipating for long. And as there are already drivers supporting this out in the wild, e. [Read More]

Version 2.01 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.1.123, adding support for all new extensions introduced with this header: VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types The main reason for this update is another one though, as it also fixes a bug for extension properties with array values not being properly saved to json and thus not being stored in the database. [Read More]

Version 2.01 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.1.123, adding support for all new extensions introduced with this header: VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types The main reason for this update is another one though, as it also fixes a bug for extension properties with array values not being properly saved to json and thus not being stored in the database. [Read More]

Version 2.00 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). The major version bump is caused by a big change in how the code for reading device extension properties and features is generated. You can find a detailled rundown on how this works below. You can download the new version from vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. Appimage for Linux Deploying Qt applications on Linux is not as easy as on Windows, esp. [Read More]

Version 1.93 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for reading additional features and properties for the following extensions: VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock VK_NV_shader_sm_builtins VK_KHR_depth_stencil_resolve properties VK_EXT_buffer_device_address features VK_EXT_pci_bus_info features In addition there were also a few changes to the Android version of the app: The app is now using the arm64-v8a architecture, as this is a requirement for distributing Android apps in Google’s playstore beginngin this August. [Read More]

Version 1.2 of the OpenGL Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all Windows and Linux. This version adds support for reading the list of supported SPIR-V extensions. These will be displayed on a new tab, and will also be uploaded to the database so you can view and compare them across multiple devices. Note that this only works with devices suppoting GL_ARB_spirv_extensions, and that even with that extension present implementations are free to report an empty list of no SPIR-V extension is supported. [Read More]

After adding a basic Nvidia RTX ray tracing example last week, I spent some more time with Vulkan and the VK_NV_ray_tracing extension. The result are two new, more advanced examples that I just uploaded to my Vulkan C++ example repository. As with the basic example I tried to keep them as straight forward as possible with all the relevant code parts put into one source file, so that following and building upon is as easy as possible. [Read More]