The Vulkan 1.4.311 specification update is out today with a handful of issues resolved with various clarifications and other subtle refinements. Plus two new extensions.

The first new extension of Vulkan 1.4.311 is VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset as an extension worked on by Valve engineers along with Qualcomm. In particular, Connor Abbott and Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team worked on VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset. With VK_EXT_fragment_density_map_offset an application can specify offsets to a fragment density map attachment to change the frame-buffer location where density values are applied without having to regenerate the fragment density map.

The other new extension to Vulkan 1.4.311 is quite interesting: VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16. Yes, this extension allows for Brain Float BF16 operations within shaders. VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 was worked on by AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, Google, Qualcomm, Imagination, and Intel engineers for allowing BFloat16 support within shaders in conjunction with the SPIR-V SPV_KHR_bfloat16 extension.

This Vulkan BF16 support with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 should be of benefit to the various [1]Vulkan machine learning / AI initiatives taking place for newer GPUs that have native support for the BF16 data type.

More details on the Vulkan 1.4.311 changes via [2]GitHub .



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

[2] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/commit/7719d5eb8eb1df49469cdf684c6b370d0ee56a34