Vulkan 1.3.264 release: Microsoft and Huawei submit extension launch to improve Direct3D 12 driver compatibility

CTOnews.com Sept. 11, Microsoft launched their first Vulkan extension, which made its debut in the latest update to the Vulkan 1.3.264 specification.

The extension, VK_MSFT_layered_driver, is designed to help common Vulkan loaders better handle driver layering, such as Vulkan mapping to Direct3D 12 hardware drivers on Windows.

As described in the VK_MSFT_layered_driver expansion document:

The Vulkan loader can sort physical devices according to platform-specific criteria. For example, on Windows, the loader uses LUID to arrange the physical devices in the same order as the DXGI adapter. However, there can also be multiple Vulkan drivers to support the same physical device, for example, one is an implementation provided by a "native" vendor, and the other is a "hierarchical" implementation on top of a different API.

Examples of layered implementations include VulkanOn12 (aka Dozen) layered on D3D12 and MoltenVK layered on Metal.

On a system where a physical device has two possible drivers, the sort order between them is currently not specified. The ideal sort order should put any native / non-hierarchical drivers before any hierarchical drivers, because layering itself adds overhead, so native drivers will provide more functionality and higher performance.

CTOnews.com query found that another new extension to this Vulkan specification update is VK_EXT_frame_boundary, an extension that helps tools / debuggers submit by frame packet queue in non-trivial scenarios, done by engineers from Google, Imagination, Arm, Nvidia and Huawei.