Vulcan 1.2 gets emulation of DirectX on Linux

When AMD introduced the low-level Mantle interface in 2013, it kicked off an intense focus on hardware development, where Microsoft soon jumped on the bandwagon with DirectX 12. In 2016, it was time for old competitor OpenGL to approach hardware, which happened in the form of Vulcan.

Khronos Group, the organization behind the interface, is now releasing version 1.2 of Vulkan. The news this time is that 23 previously available add-ons will now be the official part of the specification, which in practice means that they form the basis for what developers can work towards on all available platforms. This is significant as Vulkan is available on a variety of platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Among the more startling news is that extensions for emulating the DirectX interface on Linux are now part of the specification. This comes in the form of support for the shader language HLSL, which is the language Microsoft uses in DirectX. With Vulkan 1.2, the interface gets full support for HLSL, which complements Vulkan’s own equivalent GLSL.

Thanks to the fact that Microsoft previously released the HLSL compiler DXC as open source code, HLSL code can be converted to Vulcan’s internal data format SPIR-V, thus covering all functionality of DirectX with the exception of ray tracingDXR interface. This means that developers can now more easily move game development between Windows, Linux and Xbox game consoles.

The other big news in Vulcan 1.2 is designed to make it easier for programmers. In programming, there is something called semaphores, which are mechanisms for restricting access to resources or processes. In previous versions of the interface, there were two different mechanisms for this, which causes major concern for developers trying to control access to parallel computational queues.

Vulcan 1.2 introduces timeline-based semaphores instead. Here, developers get access to a uniform system for managing resources over parallel calculation queues. Threads in these queues can also handle significantly larger values, 64-bit versus previous 1-bit, which together with the uniform resource management is a significant modernization of the development model.

In addition, Vulkan 1.2 is focused on optimizations and improvements, but as the news does not place new demands on hardware support, the interface is already compatible with existing graphics architectures on the market. Drivers from AMD, ARM, Imagination, Intel and Nvidia have already passed Khronos Group’s compatibility test.

Nvidia offers support for Vulcan 1.2 in the latest beta version of the Geforce driver for Windows 10 and Linux.

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