Khronos Group launches Vulkan 1.4 API for cross-platform graphics and compute

Khronos Group, an open consortium of tech companies focused on interoperability standards, has announced the release of Vulkan 1.4.

It’s the latest version of its royalty-free, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute applications programming interface (API), and it makes it easy for 3D games and other software to run across hardware platforms.

Vulkan 1.4 integrates and mandates support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms.

“Vulkan 1.4 is a developer-driven update that enhances Vulkan’s value as a stable, reliable framework for creating graphics-intensive applications on any platform,” said Tom Olson, outgoing Vulkan Working Group Chair, in a statement. “As I step down, I’m proud to see the groundwork we’ve laid through our roadmaps come to fruition. Our roadmap milestone plans have empowered developers with new levels of flexibility and performance, setting Vulkan on a path for continued innovation and broader adoption in the years to come.”

The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles.

Vulkan 1.4 imposes new implementation requirements to ensure portable, cross-platform applications can stream large quantities of data to a device while simultaneously rendering at full performance. Previously optional extensions and features critical to emerging high-performance applications are now mandatory in Vulkan 1.4, ensuring their reliable availability across multiple platforms. These include push descriptors, dynamic rendering local reads, and scalar block layouts.

It also has maintenance extensions up to and including VK_KHR_maintenance6 that are now part of the core Vulkan 1.4 specification. It also has 8K rendering with up to eight separate render targets is now guaranteed to be supported, along with several other limit increases.

“Vulkan 1.4 is a milestone release that directly brings long-requested features and proven extensions into the core standard. By mandating these capabilities, we are enhancing Vulkan’s flexibility and performance across a wider range of devices, making it easier for developers to create cutting-edge applications with confidence that they will run reliably on any platform,” said Ralph Potter, newly elected Vulkan working group chair, in a statement.

The Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) is an extensive set of close to three million tests in open source that all Vulkan implementers must pass, increasing cross-platform consistency. AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Samsung all have development drivers that have passed Vulkan 1.4 Conformance. Additionally, Mesa open-source Linux drivers have passed Vulkan 1.4 conformance on AMD, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm hardware. Production drivers that have passed Khronos’s formal conformance testing process are listed on the Vulkan Conformant Products register.

Vulkan’s tooling ecosystem continues to grow, providing developers with powerful, community-driven tools that improve shader portability and performance. The Vulkan SDK from LunarG supports multiple shader languages, including HLSL, GLSL, and Slang—now a Khronos-hosted open-source project—enabling developers to use the shading language that best suits their technical and commercial requirements. The Vulkan SDK will be updated to include support for version 1.4 in January 2025.

The Khronos Vulkan Working Group said it welcomes feedback about Vulkan 1.4 on GitHub Vulkan-Docs. Developers are also encouraged to join the Vulkan Discord channel and other support forums at vulkan.org.

Khronos will host a Vulkan BOF (Birds of a Feather) meeting at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 on Thursday, December 5, 2024, at 3:30 p.m. local time in Tokyo.

“Vulkan 1.4 brings implementations across the industry to greater feature parity, requiring several features that AMD hardware has supported since Vulkan 1.0, as well as a number of newer features from the Vulkan 2022 and 2024 roadmap milestones that will help improve the developer experience. AMD intends to support Vulkan 1.4 in a release of our AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition driver early next year,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, senior vice president and chief software officer at AMD, in a statement.

“Vulkan 1.4 makes it easier than ever for developers to create and deploy GPU-accelerated applications,” said Thiru Sinnathamby, vice president of software engineering at Nvidia, in a statement. “Today, NVIDIA is shipping conformant drivers with support for Vulkan 1.4 plus full Roadmap 2024 milestone functionality on Windows 10, Windows 11, and Linux, all supported by our updated Nsight Graphics tools.”