Vulkan 1.3.284 Released With Another Extension To Help Zink

Vulkan 1.3.284 was published on Monday with only a few changes but bearing one notable new extension.

The new extension with Vulkan 1.3.284 is VK_EXT_legacy_vertex_attributes. The VK_EXT_legacy_vertex_attributes extension was developed by Valve's ike Blumenkrantz and Alyssa Rosenzweig along with input from NVIDIA and LunarG engineers. This extension was designed with OpenGL-on-Vulkan compatibility implementations in mind like Mesa's Zink driver.

VK_EXT_legacy_vertex_attributes allows for legacy features of OpenGL's vertex attributes feature to be supported in Vulkan. This allows for vertex attributes loaded from arbitrary buffer alignments, vertex attributes using arbitrary strides, and vertex attributes where the component data type of the binding does not match the component numeric type of the shader input.

More details on the few changes and new extension in Vulkan 1.3.284 can be found via this commit.

Intel's ANV Vulkan driver within Mesa has already merged support for this new Vulkan extension. Meanwhile Mesa merge requests are open / under review for Radeon RADV support, Lavapipe for that Vulkan software implementation, and then hooking it up for Zink.