After almost three years of work, the Khronos consortium, which develops graphics standards, published the specification Vulkan 1.4, determining the API for access to graphic and computing capabilities of GPU. The new specification has incorporated the accumulated extensions, which were previously positioned as optional, and also provided a number of new opportunities and increased minimal equipment requirements. The Vulkan SDK is planned to be published in January 2025.
Products with Vulkan 1.4 support are being prepared for release by AMD, ARM, Imagination, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Samsung. Open Drivers for GPU AMD (RADV), Apple M1/M2 (Honeykrisp), Intel (ANV), NVIDIA (NVK), and Qualcomm (TU), developed by the Mesa project, have already passed all compatibility tests with Vulkan 1.4 from the CTS (Khronos Conformance Test Suite) and are included in the list of certified drivers. The list also includes drivers from Samsung and Qualcomm for the Android platform, as well as drivers for GPU Powervr D-Series Dxt* from Imagination Technologies and Proprietary Drivers from NVIDIA.
- Added support for the mechanism “streaming transfers, designed to ensure streaming large volumes of data between the main system (host) and a graphic device, without interrupting rendering and without slowing its performance. The mechanism is implemented using a new extension vk_ext_host_image_image_copy, support of which is optional.
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