Microsoft launched its first Vulkan extension, which debuted in the latest Vulkan 1.3.264 specification update.
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.
