NVIDIA GDC Vulkan Driver available now!
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of the NVIDIA GDC Vulkan developer driver which supports not only that extensions that Khronos just released, but also a set of Vulkan extensions that provide the multi-projection functionality of our Maxwell and Pascal GPU architectures, which is the foundation for technology such as VRWorks, fast voxelization, and single pass cubemap rendering.
New Sets of Extensions
The sharing set provides the ability to share memory and synchronization primitives across process and instance boundaries, which are useful among other things for implementing VR runtimes:
- VK_KHX_external_memory
- VK_KHX_external_memory_capabilities
- VK_KHX_external_memory_fd
- VK_KHX_external_memory_win32
- VK_KHX_external_semaphore
- VK_KHX_external_semaphore_capabilities
- VK_KHX_external_semaphore_fd
- VK_KHX_external_semaphore_win32
- VK_KHX_win32_keyed_mutex
The descriptor update set provides alternate ways to update resource references between draw or compute dispatch calls. These methods may be more convenient for legacy applications, and/or more efficient when a fixed set of resources must be updated repeatedly:
The explicit multi-GPU set adds support for treating multiple GPUs as a single logical device, so that applications can easily make use of multiple GPUs in a single application for use cases such as Alternate Frame Rendering, Split Frame Rendering or VR SLI:
The multiview set provides the ability to render geometry to multiple surfaces, each with its own viewing parameters. For applications such as rendering stereo pairs or environment maps, this can be more efficient than rendering each view separately:
The Maxwell set provides the building blocks for Multi Resolution Shading, voxelization and single pass cubemap rendering. Additional extensions expose improvements to MSAA as well as additional scissor like functionality.
- VK_NV_geometry_shader_passthrough
- VK_NV_viewport_array2
- VK_NV_viewport_swizzle
- VK_NV_sample_mask_override_coverage
- VK_EXT_discard_rectangles
The Pascal set provides the building blocks for Lens Matched Shading and Single Pass Stereo. The extensions are:
References
Drivers, SDK & Headers
- GDC 2017 developer driver version 376.98 for Windows and Linux
- LunarG SDK version 1.0.42.0 for Windows and Linux
- Vulkan spec release 1.0.42