Vulkan 1.1 is here
Posted on March 8, 2018
| Sascha
A bit later than initially planned Vulkan 1.1 was released to the public yesterday, as usual with day-one driver support by most of the IHVs.
Vulkan 1.1 promoted several extension to the core and also adds interesting new functionality like vendor independent subgroup operations.
You can get all the details at the Khronos Vulkan landing page.
Note that all my open source examples, demos and applications will work fine with Vulkan 1.
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Conservative rasterization in Vulkan using VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization
Posted on March 4, 2018
| Sascha
I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples that demonstrates the basic use of conservative rasterization using the VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization extension. This has been missing from Vulkan some time now (while other APIs already offer this feature) but has recently been added and is already support by at least NVIDIA.
Conservative rasterization changes the way fragments are generated, and enabling over estimation generates fragments for every pixel touched instead of only pixels that are fully covered.
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How-to video: Debugging a non-visible model in Vulkan using RenderDoc
Posted on February 26, 2018
| Sascha
One of the most common Vulkan related that I’m seeing a lot is about rendering stuff that somehow ends up being not visible on the screen, even though technically everything looks okay (no validation layer errors, correct buffer uploads, etc.).
Luckily there are debugging tools tools like RenderDoc that can help locating and fixing such problems. But not everyone knows about such tools or how to use them for debugging these kind of problems.
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Vulkan glTF 2.0 C++ phyiscal based rendering
Posted on February 11, 2018
| Sascha
I have released the first working version of a separate (from the examples) Vulkan physical based rendering example that uses the glTF 2.0 model file format.
The repository can be found at https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan-glTF-PBR.
glTF is a royalty free format specification by the Khronos Group and is a new format for 3D models gaining lots of traction. With version 2.0 it also added several PBR extensions and definitions.
I decided to make this a stand-alone project instead of “just” another example in my Vulkan C++ example repository to make it easier getting into the code.
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New Vulkan example: Cascaded shadow mapping
Posted on December 30, 2017
| Sascha
In what is most probably my last Vulkan example for 2017 I have added a cascaded shadow mapping example to my open source Vulkan C++ example repository:
One big problem of traditional shadow mapping, esp. with large outdoor scenes is the resolution you get as one single shadow map has to cover the whole camera spectrum.
With cascaded shadow maps the frustum is split up into multiple frustums (along scene depth) with each getting it’s own, full-resolution, depth map.
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Combined Vulkan and OpenGL ES listing for android
Posted on October 30, 2017
| Sascha
Upon popular request I finally got around combining android device data from my Vulkan and OpenGL ES hardware databases into a convenient table. This should be handy if you plan on supporting both apis on Vulkan or if you just need to check for general device support.
The new page can be reached via https://android.gpuinfo.org/
It combines all android device reports from the Vulkan database with all reports from the OpenGL ES database and also uses google’s official device list for translating device IDs (stored with Vulkan and OpenGL ES reports) into actual retail names.
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Headless Vulkan examples
Posted on September 16, 2017
| Sascha
I have just added two minimal, mostly self-contained cross-platform headless Vulkan examples to my open source C++ Vulkan repository. Unlike the other examples in my repository these two don’t require a surface (created from a window) and as such can be run on systems with no window compositor.
The intention behind the two examples is to show how Vulkan can be used for running graphics and compute tasks without the need for an actual user interface to be present i.
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The Vulkan Device Simulation Layer
Posted on August 19, 2017
| Sascha
LunarG recently made the new Vulkan Device Simulation layer public. This is a Vulkan instance level layer that injects physical device properties, limits and features based on a json input file, simulating different features than the actual Vulkan device you are running on. The idea behind this is to help developers check if their Vulkan applications can handle devices with missing features and tighter limits without having to actually run on a such a device.
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iOS and macOS support added to the Vulkan examples
Posted on July 1, 2017
| Sascha
Thanks to a contribution from Bill Hollings, one of the developers from MoltenVK , my open source C++ Vulkan examples now also support Apple’s iOS and macOS platforms.
MoltenVK is a commercial Vulkan implementation that runs on top of Apple’s Metal api with a free trial available.
Details on how to build and run the examples for those platforms can be found in this readme.
Note that not all examples will work on iOS or macOS due to the differences in supported features like geometry or tessellation shaders not being available in Metal.
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Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer 1.4 released
Posted on May 28, 2017
| Sascha
A new version of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This is the biggest update since I released this tool, including lots of new features that also brought along a few changes to the online database. I also decided to drop the “beta” tag now that more than 1,300 reports have been uploaded, making this the first non-beta release of the Vulkan Hardware Capability viewer.
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