The extension, named VK_MSFT_layered_driver, is designed to help common Vulkan loaders better handle driver layering, such as Vulkan mapping on Direct3D 12 hardware drivers on Windows.

As described in the VK_MSFT_layered_driver extension documentation:

 The Vulkan loader is able to sort physical devices based on platform-specific criteria. For example, on Windows, the loader uses LUID to place physical devices in the same order as the DXGI adapter. However, it is possible to have multiple Vulkan drivers providing support for the same physical device, for example, where one is a "native" vendor-provided implementation and another is a "layered" implementation on top of a different API.

 Examples of layered implementations include VulkanOn12 (aka Dozen) layered on D3D12 and MoltenVK layered on Metal.

 On systems where there are two possible drivers for a physical device, the sort order between them is currently unspecified. The ideal sort order would be to sort any native/unlayered driver before any layered driver, since layering itself adds overhead, so the native driver will provide more functionality and a higher performance.

It is found that another new extension in this Vulkan specification update is VK_EXT_frame_boundary, which is an extension that can help tools/debuggers submit by frame grouping queues in non-trivial scenarios. It is provided by Google, Imagination, Arm, and Nvidia Completed with Huawei engineers.

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Wine 8.0 was released this week, and the Wine Git branch is receiving new feature patches after a feature freeze since early December.

New work in Wine Git includes enabling VK_EXT_hdr_metadata support in Wine Vulkan code. the VK_EXT_hdr_metadata extension is used to handle high dynamic range (HDR) metadata for primary colors, white point, and luminance ranges as part of the Vulkan swap chain. This Wine patch is required to handle HDR for native Vulkan games such as Doom Eternal, as well as Direct3D games with HDR support utilizing DXVK or VKD3D-Proton.

Valve is using this patch as part of its Wine based Proton build, which will be used upstream in Wine 8.1+ and next year’s Wine 9.0 stable release. This is part of Valve’s operating system that supports HDR games — currently limited to their Gamescope compositor, as the entire Linux desktop is still working on improving its HDR support.

The Wine Vulkan patch for HDR metadata extensions was submitted by Joshua Ashton of the Valve Linux team. The support was merged into the Wine software with this commit to provide HDR support for Windows games on Linux.

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The Vulkan API and the Vulkan Video API 1.0 are from The Khronos Group, and the latest Vulkan Video API 1.0 extensions include the following four extensions.

• VK_KHR_video_queue: The standard API for all video encoding operations.
• VK_KHR_video_decode_queue: Standard API for all video decoding operations.
• VK_KHR_video_decode_h264: the specific functions and parameters of H.264 decoding.
• VK_KHR_video_decode_h265: the specific functions and parameters of H.265 decoding.

Both “VK_KHR_video_decode_h264” and “VK_KHR_video_decode_h265” are currently marked as “KHR “Michael Larabel of the Phoronix website notes that Vulkan Video API 1.0 does not support AV1 or VP9 video acceleration extensions at this time, but the Khronos Group is considering introducing them in a future release.

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