Vulkan 1.1 specification announced, improves multi support

The Khronos Group today announced the new Vulkan 1.1 specification that includes major enhancements to this rival API to Microsoft's ubiquitous DirectX. Vulkan 1.1 standardizes some features that were previously offered as extensions, achieving parity with Microsoft's DirectX 12 itself.

Vulkan 1.1 catches up to DX12

First of all, we have explicit support for multiple GPUs giving developer control, allowing a program to extend its work across multiple GPUs more effectively than with SLI and Crossfire systems. The resources of one physical GPU can be used by another GPU, different commands can be run on different GPUs, and one GPU can display images rendered by another GPU.

With Vulkan 1.1, Direct3D memory layouts are handled natively, and HLSL programs that take over these layouts are also handled natively. This makes it easy for developers to move existing Direct3D code to Vulkan as they no longer need to rewrite all of their programs. The new specification also enhances the GPU's programming capabilities with subgroup operations, which allow data to be shared in various ways among the different threads of a GPU-based calculation.

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Vulkan 1.1 also has improvements for virtual reality applications, which requires representing two different perspectives of the same scene, one for each eye. With Vulkan 1.1, developers can use multiple view, where a single set of rendering commands produces multiple slightly different outputs with a single call, making it more efficient.

The new version of Vulkan also supports the new YUV / YCbCr color formats commonly used by motion video codecs. This relates to built-in support for protected content. This support allows this content to be used as part of a GPU rendered scene, while respecting copy protection and secure display.

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