NVIDIA has published new Vulkan beta driver builds for Windows and Linux that introduce VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for BFloat16 "BF16" support within shaders.

Last week The Khronos Group released [1]Vulkan 1.4.311 with this new extension for BFloat16 . Brain Float 16 operations are now allowed within shaders with this cross-vendor extension and the associated SPIR-V SPV_KHR_bfloat16. This BFloat16 extension should prove particularly useful for modern GPUs and software supporting [2]Vulkan-accelerated machine learning / AI .

Now available is the NVIDIA 570.123.07 Linux driver build and the Windows 572.91 driver as part of their Vulkan beta program for supporting the KHR_shader_bfloat16 extension. These latest NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver builds can be downloaded from [3]developer.nvidia.com .

Though in beta form, this makes NVIDIA now the first vendor shipping Vulkan drivers with BF16 support. The only other Vulkan driver I have seen so far prepping for BF16 support is [4]this Mesa merge request for Intel prepping VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 support for their ANV Vulkan driver along with the necessary SPIR-V and NIR changes. That code has yet to be merged to Mesa Git. With time the other prominent drivers like RADV will presumably be advertising BFloat16 support.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4.311-Released

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Vulkan-AI-ML-Success

[3] https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver

[4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/34105