Sascha Willems

Intro 2021 starts with a huge update for both the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer application and the accompanying Vulkan Hardware Database, bringing some long-awaited features along with many smaller changes, additions and improvements. Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer 3.0 Update mechanism One of the most requested features was a proper update mechanism, that would allow users to update reports with stuff added in newer versions. This version finally adds such an update mechanism. [Read More]

New extension data features The Vulkan hardware database just got another big feature update, adding some long outstanding functionality mostly related to extension features and properties.The Vulkan hardware capability viewer got support for those some time ago, and the database already displays these for single reports. But up until now there were no listings on those extension related information. This meant it was not possible to filter devices based on that data. [Read More]

Vulkan ray tracing extensions final specifications have been released The finalized specifications for the cross-vendor hardware accelerated ray tracing extensions have finally been released, after being available as a provisional extension for some time now. So Vulkan now has official cross-vendor, cross-os support for accessing hardware accelerated ray tracing features. A great overview can be found on the Khronos blog, along with a great article on how ray tracing works. [Read More]

New target platform - Mac OSX With the recent updates from the Vulkan® Portability™ initiative and the addition of the relevant extensions in release 2.21, Mac OSX has become an even more important target for Vulkan applications. So I decided to officially add support for Mac OSX to the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer. This only required a few changes to the application’s source code (mostly related to surface extensions) and a new target for the Travis CI setup to build the binaries. [Read More]

Release Version 2.21 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.2.154, adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_KHR_portability_subset VK_EXT_4444_formats Vulkan Portability Most notable is the addition of VK_KHR_portability_subset to support the Vulkan® Portability™ initiative (github). This extension allows non-conformant Vulkan implementations to be built on top of other graphics api like Metal or DirectX, and allows identification of features missing for a fully-conformant Vulkan implementation. [Read More]

Release Version 2.2 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). New extensions This version has been updated to Vulkan Headers 1.2.148, adding support for reading new features and properties provided via VK_KHR_GET_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_PROPERTIES_2 for the following extensions: VK_EXT_fragment_density_map2 VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state VK_EXT_private_data VK_EXT_image_robustness Wayland support Also new with this version is a dedicated build for Wayland. The Linux versions have always been built for X11, but thanks to external contributions, the application now also has a native Wayland version available at the download page. [Read More]

Moving to glTF When I started writing my first Vulkan samples glTF was still in it’s infancy, esp. in terms of tooling. So I went with more common formats and went with the Open Asset importer library (Assimp) for loading these. But things rapidly changed with glTF 2.0, which is now pretty much and industry standard and supported by many DCC tools. And since both Vulkan and glTF are both Khronos standards this is a perfect match. [Read More]

One of Vulkan’s biggest additions (compared to OpenGL) was the introduction of the SPIR-V intermediate representation for shaders. This makes it possible to use different shader language front-ends for writing your shaders, with the only requirement being to be able to compile that language to valid SPIR-V with Vulkan semantics. Unlike OpenGL (except for GL_ARB_gl_spirv) this no longer confines you to use GLSL for writing Vulkan shaders. And while GLSL is still the primary language for my C++ Vulkan samples, SPIR-V opens up options for different shader languages. [Read More]

I have contributed a new sample to the official Khronos Vulkan Samples repository that shows usage of the VK_EXT_debug_utils for adding debugging information to your Vulkan application. This extension combines the old VK_EXT_debug_marker and VK_EXT_debug_report into a new extension that also implements some changes and additions based on developer feedback for the old extensions. For example it’s now possible to debug instance creation and destruction with this new extension. [Read More]

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]