Vulkan 1.4.324 is out today as the first Vulkan API specification update in two weeks with a variety of clarifications/corrections plus a new extension from AMD.

VK_AMDX_dense_geometry_format is the new experimental AMD vendor extension in Vulkan 1.4.324. VK_AMDX_dense_geometry_format is for providing the ability to build ray-tracing acceleration structures from pre-compressed Dense Geometry Format geometry data.

Dense Geometry Format "DGF" was developed by AMD as a means of compressing triangle meshes for more efficient hardware ray-tracing. Those curious about the Dense Geometry Format can read the [1]DGF whitepaper from last year. AMD also maintains the DGF SDK as part of [2]GPUOpen and is fully open-source software. There is also [3]this blog post from earlier in the year covering more about Dense Geometry Format for helping the AMD ray-tracing efforts.

So with today's Vulkan spec update VK_AMDX_dense_geometry_format is now available for those wanting to experiment with using DGF for more efficient and performant Vulkan ray-tracing on AMD GPUs. It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is ultimately by game developers around DGF.

More details on the Vulkan 1.4.324 spec changes via [4]Vulkan-Docs on GitHub .



[1] https://gpuopen.com/download/DGF.pdf

[2] https://gpuopen.com/dgf/

[3] https://gpuopen.com/learn/problem_increasing_triangle_density/

[4] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/commit/f8cc250718793afb6c15db69980ba5ff7c24920f