New Vulkan® Extensions in our latest Radeon Software Adrenalin driver 20.8.3

Our latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver – 20.8.3 – was released on 27th August 2020. It includes a few recent extensions that aim to improve developer and user experience.

Here’s a brief overview:

• VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state

  • This extension adds more dynamic states. This allows applications to reduce the need to recompile and bind pipeline state objects.

  • Applications with shaders that are used with a large set of unique state combinations can drastically reduce the number of pipelines created, improving both load time and reducing the possibility of runtime hitching.

• VK_EXT_private_data

  • This extension allows applications (or layers) to store application-defined data in a 64-bit private data slot.

  • Layers using this extension should be able to achieve higher performance than using global maps for per-object data, improving user experience when running with layers enabled.

• VK_EXT_image_robustness

  • This extension adds stricter requirements such that drivers return default RGBA values instead of undefined values for out-of-bounds reads. The number of components returned depends on the number of components present in the selected format.

  • This adds a piece of functionality in the OpenGL® and OpenGL ES™ APIs that has been missing from Vulkan® until this point, enabling more content to be ported to Vulkan®.

• VK_GOOGLE_user_type

  • This extension indicates the driver’s support for shader modules using the SPV_GOOGLE_user_type SPIR-V extension.

  • The DirectX® Shader Compiler can generate SPIR-V shaders containing user-annotated type information present in HLSL, but otherwise missing from SPIR-V, allowing this additional information to be retrieved later via reflection, enabling more content to be ported to Vulkan®.

You can download the 20.8.3 driver here.

You can find out more about Vulkan® here on GPUOpen: