• • Promoter/contributor levels: Directly influence the Vulkan spec (with voting rights)
  • Associate/Academic levels: Advise the Working Group on future evolution topics (no voting rights)

  Find Out More

• Khronos hosts and maintains several public repos for Vulkan - please follow the contributing and licensing guidelines listed on the repos:

  • The Vulkan specification (Vulkan_docs)
  • Vulkan Guide (vulkan_guide)
  • Khronos Vulkan Tutorial (vulkan_tutorial)
  • Vulkan samples (vulkan_samples)
  • docs.vulkan.org website (vulkan_site)
  • Many tools, layers, profiles, etc.

  The public community can contribute via

  • Submitting issues
  • Suggesting improvements

  Find Out More

• • Vulkan Roadmap "proposal" (for background on Vulkan Roadmaps)

    The Vulkan working group welcomes input from the developer community on challenges that you would like to see targeted in future Vulkan Roadmap milestones. If you have significant problems you’d like to see solved, major pain points that need addressing, improvements to streamline development, etc., your feedback will help guide the development of new solutions.

  • Submit a "Roadmap Feedback" issue on Vulkan-Docs

    Open an issue (or comment on an existing Roadmap Feedback issue) on the Vulkan-Docs Github repo using the Roadmap Feedback issue template. See issue #2220 for an example.

  • Discord channel for roadmap ideas

    Go to #vulkan-roadmap-discussions on the official Vulkan Discord and post suggested roadmap improvements to seed discussions with other Vulkan developers and Work Group members

Baldur's Gate 3 - Larian Studios

• • Vulkan 1.4 Specification

    The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles

  • Read the press release

    Khronos Streamlines Development and Deployment of GPU-Accelerated Applications with Vulkan 1.4

• • Press Release

    The Vulkan Working Group has released two important updates to the API and ecosystem: an entirely new Descriptor system and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone.

  • Roadmap 2026 Specification

    This milestone raises the baseline feature support of Vulkan implementations as with prior milestones. In addition, this milestone makes guarantees about swapchain and presentation support for implementations.

• • Read the blog

    The new VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension represents a complete overhaul of the current Vulkan descriptor system, providing direct access to descriptor memory while preserving compatibility with legacy descriptor sets and other APIs.

  • Spec Proposal Document

    This document outlines a proposal to make the management of descriptor memory more explicit, allowing descriptors to be present in buffer memory, allowing the data and memory to be managed alongside other buffer objects.

• • Press Release

    Khronos has released finalized extensions, collectively called ‘Vulkan Video’, for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. This API incorporates industry feedback and exposes core decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.

  • Vulkan Video Blog - Decode

    Vulkan Video adheres to the Vulkan philosophy of providing applications flexible, fine-grained control over scheduling, synchronization, and memory allocation. By leveraging the existing Vulkan API framework, the Vulkan Video extensions enable efficient, low-latency, low-overhead use of processing resources for accelerated video processing.

  • Vulkan Video Blog - Encode

    With the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams.

  • Vulkan Video Blog - AV1 Decode

    Khronos Releases AV1 Decode in Vulkan Video with SDK Support for H.264/H.265 Encode

• • Overview Blog

    The newly released VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension brings extensive improvements to Vulkan queue submission, events, and pipeline barriers to significantly improve API usability for developers.

  • Technical Blog

    The goal of this article is to help developers easily understand and not be intimidated or confused by one of the toughest aspects of Vulkan: Synchronization.

  • Synchronization 2 in the Vulkan Guide

    See this chapter in the Vulkan Guide for an overview of the latest Vulkan synchronization capabilities

  • Specification

    See the details of VK_KHR_synchronization2 in the Vulkan specification

  • Synchronization 2 code sample

    Demonstrates the use of the reworked synchronization api introduced with VK_KHR_synchronization2. This sample uses the new extension to streamline memory barriers used for compute and graphics work submissions.

• • Read the Blog

    Khronos® has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan®, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the existing Vulkan framework.

  • Ray Tracing in the Vulkan Guide

    For an overview of Ray Tracing in Vulkan, check out this chapter in the Vulkan Guide

  • Specification

    Start with the Ray Traversal and Ray Tracing sections of the Vulkan Spec for more details

  • Ray Tracing code sample

    Render a basic scene using the official cross-vendor ray tracing extension. Shows how to setup all data structures required for ray tracing

• • Read the Blog

    The new timeline semaphore synchronization API defines a primitive containing a superset of both the original VkSemaphore and VkFence primitives while simultaneously eliminating many of the most painful limitations of the previous APIs

  • Specification

    See detials for Timeline Semaphore in the Vulkan Specification

  • Timeline Semaphore code sample

    Demonstrates various use cases which are enabled with timeline semaphores. The sample implements "Game of Life" using out-of-order signal and wait, multiple waits on same semaphore in different queues, waiting and signalling semaphore on host.

• • Read the blog

    The VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension provides a new, flexible technique to control the fragment shading rate, enabling developers to perform shading at a lower resolution than the render targets.

  • Specification

    See detials for VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate in the Vulkan Specification

  • Fragment Shading Rate code sample

    Uses a special framebuffer attachment to control fragment shading rates for different framebuffer regions. This allows explicit control over the number of fragment shader invocations for each pixel covered by a fragment

• • Read the blog

    Android is enabling a host of useful new Vulkan extensions for mobile. These new extensions are set to improve the state of graphics APIs for modern applications, enabling new use cases and changing how developers can design graphics renderers going forward.

  • Specification

    See details for Descriptor Indexing in the Vulkan Specification

  • Descriptor Indexing code sample

    Demonstrates how to use descriptor indexing to enable update-after-bind and non-dynamically uniform indexing of descriptors

Latest project

Vulkan Portability