On January 25th 2022, the Khronos Group released the official specification for Vulkan 1.3, which marks an important milestone in the world of open graphics. Vulkan is the only open standard modern GPU API and version 1.3 will soon be available on a wide range of operating systems and hardware.

As members of the Khronos group, Igalia is proud to have contributed improvements to the Vulkan specification text multiple times in the past few years. We’re also glad to have enhanced Khronos’ Conformance Test Suite for Vulkan by fixing a huge number of issues and creating numerous new tests to ensure drivers will meet the quality levels API users expect.

At the same time, Igalia is contributing to the Mesa project with the goal of having open-source Vulkan-conformant implementations for multiple GPU vendors ready for use in both consumer and industry grade products. One example of this work is the recent Vulkan 1.1 conformance of V3DV and Turnip drivers which are heavily developed by Igalia.

Vulkan 1.3 brings many interesting changes that will make the API easier to use. This includes the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 profile, which defines a set of extensions and features that will be widely available on desktop and mid-to-high range mobile GPUs, dynamic rendering to simplify creating and using pipelines without the need for framebuffer or render pass objects, additional dynamic state to reduce jittering and the number of required pipelines, or the new and easier to use Synchronization2 API.