Vulkan 1.3 Specification Released: Fighting Fragmentation with Profiles

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Khronos this morning is taking the wraps off of Vulkan 1.3, the newest iteration of the group’s open and cross-platform API for graphics programming.

Vulkan 1.3 follows Khronos’s usual 2 year release cadence for the API, and it comes at a critical juncture for the API and its future development. Vulkan has been a full and official specification since 2016, turning 6 years old this year. This has given the API plenty of time to mature and have its kinks worked out, as well as to be adopted by software and hardware developers alike. But it also means that with the core aspects of the API having been hammered out, where to go next has become less obvious/harmonious. And with the API in use for everything from smartphones to high-end PCs, Vulkan is beginning to fragment at points thanks to the wide range of capabilities in devices.

As a result, for Vulkan 1.3, Khronos and its consortium members are taking aim at the future of the API, particularly from a development standpoint. Vulkan is still in a healthy place now, but in order to keep it that way, Khronos needs to ensure that Vulkan has room to grow with new features and functionality, but all without leaving behind a bunch of perfectly good hardware in the process. Thankfully, this isn’t a new problem for the consortium – it’s something virtually every standard faces if it lives long enough to become widely used – so Khronos is hitting the ground running with some further refinements to Vulkan.

Vulkan 1.3 Core

But before we get into Khronos’s fragmentation-fighting efforts, let’s first talk about what’s coming to the Vulkan 1.3 core specification. The core spec covers all of the features a Vulkan implementation is required to support, from the most basic smartphone to the most powerful workstation. As a result it has a somewhat narrow scope in terms of graphical features, but as the name says on the tin, it’s the common core of the API.

As with previous versions of the spec, Khronos is targeting this to work on existing Vulkan-compliant hardware. Specifically, Vulkan 1.3 is designed to work on OpenGL ES 3.1 hardware, meaning that of the new features being rolled into the core spec, none of them can be beyond what ES 3.1 hardware can do.

Consequently, Vulkan 1.3’s core spec isn’t focused on adding new graphical features or the like. By design, graphical feature additions are handled by extensions. Instead, the 1.3 core spec additions are largely a quality-of-life update for Vulkan developers, with a focus on adding features that simplify some aspect of the rendering process or add more control over it.

Altogether, Khronos is moving 23 existing extensions into the Vulkan 1.3 core spec. Most of these extensions are very much inside-baseball fodder for graphics programmers, but there are a couple of highlights. These include the integer dot product function, which is already widely used for machine learning inference on GPUs, as well as support for dynamic rendering. These functions already exist as extensions – so many developers can and are already using them – but by moving them into the core spec, they are now required for all Vulkan 1.3 implementations, opening them up to a wider array of developers.

But arguably the single most important addition coming to Vulkan isn’t an extension being promoted into the core specification. Rather, it’s entirely new functionality entirely, in the form of feature profiles.
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