Vulkan 1.4.362 Released With New Extension Developed By Valve

Vulkan 1.4.362 is out this morning as the newest routine spec update. Making Vulkan 1.4.362 more notable beyond a couple bug fixes are two new Vulkan API extensions, both of which were worked on by Valve's Linux graphics team and one of them being a Valve vendor extension.

The first new extension is VK_KHR_pipeline_library_group_handles to allow querying group handles directly from pipeline libraries. This in turn improves compatibility with the DXR 1.1 (DirectX Ray-Tracing Tier 1.1) specification. VK_KHR_pipeline_library_group_handles was worked on by Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve along with engineers from AMD, Igalia, Intel, and NVIDIA.

The other new extension is VK_VALVE_buffer_device_address_allocation_alignment and was developed by Hans-Kristian Arntzen and Connor Abbott of Valve's Linux graphics team. This new extension allows for specifying the alignment of any buffer device address allocation. This VK_VALVE_buffer_device_address_allocation_alignment extension aims to help with Direct3D 12 layering with the likes of Valve's VKD3D-Proton. The spec elaborates:
"This extension allows applications to specify the alignment of any buffer device address allocation, beyond the current specification requirements which only requires that the memory has enough alignment to satisfy any alignment request the implementation may require on its own.

When layering some other APIs, e.g. D3D12, applications are sometimes able to rely on the allocated buffer device address being aligned to a potentially larger alignment than what the implementation would normally allocate for.

Some applications rely on this implementation detail and will behave in unexpected ways if tighter alignments are used."
The latest Vulkan spec in full is available at Vulkan.org.