Vulkan: Continuing to Forge Ahead

As excitement builds for SIGGRAPH 2025, the Khronos Group is preparing to host its annual Vulkan Birds of a Feather session at SIGGRAPH 2025 on Wednesday, August 13, from 4:30 to 6:00 pm. The BOF is an essential gathering for graphics developers, GPU vendors, and graphics enthusiasts eager to stay on the cutting edge of the industry’s leading cross-platform graphics and compute API. This year’s Vulkan BOF will be packed with meaningful updates and will provide a great opportunity for community engagement.

In this blog post, we preview the key Vulkan developments, initiatives, and events that will take center stage at the BOF, including: an update on Vulkan 1.4 adoption, recent extensions, a proposed new deprecation mechanism, enhancements to our samples and documentation, plus updates on the Vulkanised 2026 conference, and much more.

1. Vulkan 1.4: A Roadmap with Real Impact
2. Vulkan 1.4: Faster App Loads, Less Stutter and Less Memory Usage
3. Spotlight on Deprecation
4. Vulkan: The Recommended Graphics API for Android 
5. Revamped Vulkan Docs & Samples for Enhanced Learning
6. Vulkan Video: Rounding Out the Suite of Decode and Encode Extensions
7. Vulkan Video: Video Encode Intra-refresh Extension
8. Join the SIGGRAPH 2025 Lab Session on “Vulkan Ray Tracing”
9. Vulkanised 2026: The Global Gathering for Vulkan Developers
10. New Vulkan Educators Forum
11. Top Tier Applications Go Native with Vulkan Support
12. Simplifying Vulkan Synchronisation: So Long, Image Layouts
13. Vulkan SDK Updates
14. Vulkan 1.4 content on MoltenVK
15. Vulkan SC: Graphics and Compute for the Safety-Critical Industry
16. Vulkan ML: Increased Throughput with bfloat16 and 8-bit floating-point data types

Vulkan 1.4: A Roadmap with Real Impact

The Vulkan ecosystem hit a major milestone in 2025 with the widespread availability of production graphics drivers that are Vulkan 1.4 conformant. Vulkan 1.4 was announced in December 2024 (see Press Release) and integrated and mandated support for many proven features into the core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, and greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms.

Production Vulkan 1.4 drivers that have passed Khronos's formal conformance testing include AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel, Mesa Linux, Nintendo, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Samsung. The latest list of conformant Vulkan products is listed on the Vulkan Conformant Products Register. The Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) is an extensive set of nearly three million tests designed to increase cross-platform consistency across all Vulkan Adopters. View the open-source Vulkan CTS on GitHub.

In addition, MoltenVK provides a non-conformant layered implementation of Vulkan 1.4 on macOS, iOS, tvOS, and visionOS.

Vulkan 1.4: Faster App Loads, Less Stutter and Less Memory Usage

The release of Vulkan 1.4 introduced Host Image Copy, a significant feature that addresses performance bottlenecks on UMA (Unified Memory Architecture) devices, such as typical Android smartphones and systems without dedicated transfer queues. Based on VK_EXT_host_image_copy, this feature enables applications to transfer image data using the CPU rather than the GPU, preventing resource contention with rendering operations and delivering smoother performance with reduced stuttering. Vulkan 1.4 mandates that implementations must provide either a dedicated transfer queue for uploads or support Host Image Copy functionality, ensuring developers have efficient data transfer options regardless of hardware configuration. Android 16 requires this feature unconditionally for new devices, underscoring its importance for mobile gaming. For detailed technical insights, refer to the Vulkan 1.4 Android blog post, which explains how Host Image Copy enhances Android game performance, and the original extension blog, "Copying Images on the Host in Vulkan."

A Spotlight on Deprecation

The Vulkan Working Group made an early, deliberate decision not to remove older functionality as the specification evolved, recognizing that regularly eliminating features would lead to industry fragmentation and developer confusion.

While this long-term support model offers many benefits, it also presents clear challenges. The number of possible paths through the API continues to grow, and although newer paths are often intended to replace older ones, it is not always obvious to new developers that these alternatives exist—let alone why they should be preferred. In some cases, functionality that initially seemed promising has proven, with industry experience, to be unsuitable for future use.

In recent months, the Vulkan Working Group has begun making these recommendations significantly more visible to developers by marking individual APIs as deprecated. Currently, deprecation is highlighted in the following ways:

• XML schema changes to indicate deprecation
• Tagging of APIs indicating when they are deprecated, including links to an explanation
• Detailed explanations of why something is deprecated

This is just the beginning; the list of deprecated features is still being updated, and we're working to add more tools and refine the specification to make all of this clearer and more accessible. For instance, LunarG recently merged a new deprecation layer into the validation layers, with the expectation of rolling this out in an upcoming SDK. Keep an eye on https://www.lunarg.com/news-insights/news/ for the latest updates.

We're thrilled to be making strides in fixing this longstanding issue, and hope that you'll find this new approach useful as you develop your own applications. If you have any suggestions or feedback on what we’re doing here, please let us know!

Vulkan is the Recommended Graphics API for Android

Vulkan serves as the recommended graphics API for Android and continues to gain significant traction across the mobile gaming ecosystem. Recent high-profile launches demonstrate its impact, with visually stunning titles like Tencent's Delta Force Mobile and Game of Thrones Mobile leveraging Vulkan's performance advantages to deliver console-quality experiences on mobile devices. The benefits extend beyond action and RPG genres—Pokémon TCG utilized Vulkan to optimize graphics performance across diverse hardware configurations, ensuring consistent and engaging gameplay for players regardless of their device specifications. 

The adoption momentum is substantial, with over 40% of sessions from new Unity titles now running on Vulkan*, and this percentage is expected to accelerate rapidly. Android's commitment to Vulkan deepens further as Google plans to transition core system renderers to Vulkan and expand its implementation across select devices in upcoming Android versions, solidifying its position as the future of mobile graphics.

* Games on Android 14 launched between June 2024 and December 2024

Revamped Vulkan Docs & Samples for Enhanced Learning 

Led by Holochip, with support from the Vulkan Working Group and the broader open-source community, the past six months have seen a comprehensive effort to enhance the Vulkan documentation and sample ecosystem. These updates significantly improve accessibility for newcomers while providing seasoned developers with a more robust foundation for advanced development:

• Redesigned Vulkan Specification Site: The specification is now easier to navigate, with interactive links between features, version history, and extension status.
• Updated Vulkan Samples Repository: Over 40 new and refactored samples are now available, with clearer code structure, modern idioms, and support for the Vulkan Profiles framework.
• Modernized Vulkan Tutorial with improvements covering:
  • Modernizing the Core: Several updates are focused on streamlining the tutorial to reflect the latest API specifications and development practices, making it easier than ever to write clean and efficient code (includes C++20 modules, Vulkan 1.4 alignment, Dynamic Rendering, modernized Synchronization, and more)
  • New Chapters for Real-World Applications: Building on this modern foundation, we are excited to announce a further expansion with several brand-new chapters that bridge the gap from basic rendering to full application development (including shader authoring with Slang, modern asset formats, ecosystem utilities, Vulkan Profiles, Android support, and more)
  • Integration with Modern Toolchains: Samples now work seamlessly with popular CMake-based build systems and integrate tightly with the Vulkan SDK.
• Improved Validation Layers and Debugging Tools: The validation layer team has enhanced diagnostics for common performance traps and deprecated feature usage.
• Slang Shader Support: Shaders for Vulkan samples are now available in the Khronos Slang shading language, as detailed in the blog post: Vulkan samples support Slang.

Vulkan Video: Rounding Out the Suite of Decode and Encode Extensions

The set of extensions known as "Vulkan Video" provides developers with vendor-independent access to video decoding and encoding functionality in modern GPU hardware. The release of version 1.4.317 of the Vulkan specification in June 2025 widened codec support with the introduction of VP9 decoding. VP9 was among the first royalty-free codecs to gain mass adoption and is still extensively used in video-on-demand and real-time communications.

This release completes the currently planned set of decode-related extensions, enabling developers to build platform- and vendor-independent accelerated decoding pipelines for all major modern codecs. View the full Vulkan Video Decode VP9 Extension blog post.

Vulkan Video: Video Encode Intra-refresh Extension

Version 1.4.321 of the Vulkan specification expanded Vulkan Video functionality once again with the introduction of the Encode Intra-refresh extension. This is the second advanced feature extension for encoding optimization, following the release of Encode Quantization Map.

In today's increasingly wireless world, intra-refresh is a valuable tool for increasing streaming robustness, essential to broadcast streams, wireless networks, VoIP calls, and many other applications.

Normally, each video frame can be categorized as either a keyframe (no dependencies on any other frames), or predicted (with dependencies on other frames). Keyframes are required to correctly decode all subsequent frames, so losing a single frame due to corruption or dropped packets can cause persistent errors. This can be avoided by using intra-refresh, available in Vulkan through VK_KHR_video_encode_intra_refresh. Read the blog post.

Join the SIGGRAPH 2025 Lab Session on Vulkan Ray Tracing

At this year’s SIGGRAPH, developers are invited to join a free “Hands-on Vulkan Ray Tracing With Dynamic Rendering” lab on Wednesday, August 13, from 4:30-6:00 pm. The Lab invites participants to explore how today’s Vulkan ecosystem tools and resources allow everyone to write real-time ray traced effects with far less boilerplate than in the past. 

Building on a trimmed version of the open-source Khronos Vulkan Tutorial and the vk-bootstrap and Vulkan-RAII[2] helper libraries, we will incrementally assemble a renderer that combines rasterization with ray tracing to implement accurate shadows. The session balances bite-sized coding intervals with short concept discussions, so that every participant leaves with a runnable project and a mental map of where to dig deeper afterward.

Jose Emilio Muñoz Lopez, of Arm and Steve Winston of Holochip will be presenting the lab.

Vulkanised 2026: The Global Gathering for Vulkan Developers

The growing momentum behind Vulkan isn’t just happening on more devices - it’s happening in person. Vulkanised is the premier international conference dedicated entirely to Vulkan development, and Vulkanised 2026 (San Diego, USA, on February 9-11) will mark its 8th anniversary. Whether you're building an AAA game engine or a bespoke renderer, Vulkanised is the place to connect, learn, and influence the future of Vulkan. The Call for Submissions is now open until October 10, 2025. Learn more about Vulkanised 2026.

The video recordings from previous events, including Vulkanised 2025, Vulkanised 2024, and Vulkanised 2023, are available online on the Vulkan YouTube channel.

New Vulkan Educators Forum

In April 2025, the Vulkan Developer Relations team launched the Vulkan Educators Forum to help foster collaboration with educators and to align educational materials with the latest Vulkan API improvements. A lot has changed since the original Vulkan 1.0 shipped, and the goal of the forum is to encourage a steady pipeline of graduating students who have a deep working knowledge of the most recent best practices for developing Vulkan applications.

The forum utilizes a Discord channel to enable Vulkan educators to share their experiences while teaching Vulkan and to facilitate discussions regarding the development of courses and educational materials tailored to reflect recent improvements to the Vulkan API. Members of the Vulkan team closely monitor the discussions and collaborate with the Vulkan Working Group to provide answers, insights, and guidance.

If you are involved in teaching Vulkan (online or in-person) and would like to participate in this invite-only forum, please contact Vulkan Marketing and Developer Relations, including details of the courses you teach.

Top Tier Applications Go Native with Vulkan Support

The Vulkan ecosystem continues to expand as major applications across industries adopt native Vulkan support. Here are some notable recent additions to the growing list of applications leveraging Vulkan's performance advantages:

• Datoviz is a cross-platform, open-source, high-performance GPU scientific data visualization library designed for interactive exploration of large datasets. Written in C/C++, it leverages the Vulkan graphics API and integrates with the glfw window library. Datoviz aims to provide a unified, language-agnostic platform for interactive visualization in both 2D and 3D, with support for GUIs and general-purpose GPU compute. Learn More
• Apex from Global Graphics is built on Vulkan and is the world’s first fully GPU-native PDL (Page Description Language) renderer, designed for high-performance, cross-platform applications. Unlike traditional solutions that only offload parts of the rendering to the GPU, Apex runs entirely on the GPU, delivering true high-speed PDL rendering.
• llama.cpp features a Vulkan backend that works across desktop, mobile, and MacOS (via MoltenVK). This open-source, actively maintained application makes use of VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix, VK_NV_cooperative_matrix2, VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product, and VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 extensions.
• Autodesk VRED is a professional automotive visualization and design review application that has been a cornerstone of the automotive industry for over 20 years. Originally built on OpenGL, VRED 2026 introduces a Vulkan renderer that transforms how designers and engineers visualize complex automotive scenes. VRED's Vulkan implementation delivers a hybrid rendering pipeline that combines traditional rasterization with GPU-accelerated ray tracing, enabling real-time ray-traced reflections, ambient occlusion, and environment shadows. This hybrid approach addresses critical limitations of the previous OpenGL renderer, particularly when handling the massive complexity of automotive CAD data with deep hierarchies and thousands of individual components. The implementation also enhances VRED's Live Referencing capability with Autodesk Alias, allowing surface modelers to see their changes reflected in real-time visualization scenes instantly. This workflow transformation enables unprecedented collaboration between design and visualization teams, with Vulkan's performance ensuring that complex automotive assemblies remain responsive even during live updates from CAD applications. Learn More.

Simplifying Vulkan Synchronization: So Long, Image Layouts

Synchronization in Vulkan has been notoriously difficult, a fact that developers have been highlighting for some time. As the Khronos Vulkan Working Group continues to make efforts to make Vulkan a joy to use, simplifying the synchronization API has been something we've had in our sights for a while.

One of the biggest developer complaints has been the management of image layouts, a problem that the recently released VK_KHR_unified_image_layouts extension aims to address, thereby eliminating the need for most image layout transitions. Read the full VK_KHR_unified_image_layouts extension blog post.

Vulkan SDK Updates

LunarG continues to work tirelessly to bring new features and improvements to the Vulkan SDK across Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms. Vulkan SDK updates from the past 12 months include: 

• Synchronization validation for VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore was added in October of 2024 after strong developer demand, 
• Support for Slang, the new generation shading language and compiler.
• Creation of a Windows on ARM SDK in July of 2024
• Cross-compilation on Windows/X64 & Windows ARM SDKs
• Vulkan 1.4 support was released in January of 2025
• Support of GFXReconstruct on macOS
• GFXReconstruct enhancements for portable Ray Tracing capture and replay
  • Tracking of device buffer addresses, shader group handles, and acceleration structure during capture 
  • Translation during replay to be device-independent
• Release of vkconfig3, a greatly improved and enhanced version of the Vulkan Configurator, providing features such as
  • Loading multiple versions of the same layer
  • Improved layer order (ordering of all layers, implicit included)
  • Vulkan system diagnostics 
  • Per-application layers configuration
• SDK Vulkan Specification links now use Antora, resulting in NO MORE SLOW HTML load times!
• Significant improvements to validation layer error messages with an option to output in JSON format

Vulkan 1.4 content on MoltenVK

The MoltenVK open-source project provides significant Vulkan 1.4 functionality across Apple's macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS platforms. MoltenVK is a translation layer, allowing applications and games to utilize the Vulkan API layered over Apple's Metal graphics driver stack. View MoltenVK 1.4 on GitHub.

Vulkan SC: Graphics and Compute for the Safety-Critical Industry

Vulkan SC is a streamlined, deterministic and robust API based on Vulkan 1.2 giving safety-critical application developers detailed control of GPU acceleration in a way that can be rigorously specified and tested to meet safety certification standards such as RTCA DO-178C Level A / EASA ED-12C Level A (avionics); IEC 61508 (industrial), IEC 62304 (Medical), and ISO 26262 ASIL D (automotive).

Conformant implementations of Vulkan SC are now running today on a wide range of platforms, and in February 2025, the Vulkan SC Working Group released the Vulkan SC Emulation Driver Stack which enables developers to prototype and develop Vulkan SC applications on consumer PC hardware running Windows or Linux without requiring specialized hardware and software components typically needed to target safety-critical systems.

Vulkan ML: Increased Throughput with bfloat16 and 8-bit floating-point data types

With machine learning algorithms commonly being run on GPUs, it has become desirable to support smaller types in GPUs to allow increased throughput for large networks. To address this, the Vulkan ML Task Sub Group has released two cross-vendor KHR extensions to support new common 16-bit and 8-bit types. bfloat16 is a floating-point type designed to provide a similar dynamic range to IEEE 754 binary 32-bit floating-point, with less precision at half the size. Two 8-bit floating point types are now also available: E4M3 and E5M2, as defined by the "FP8 Formats For Deep Learning" whitepaper.

Information on these two extensions can be found in the Vulkan documentation tool under VK_EXT_shader_float8 and VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16.

In Conclusion

The widespread adoption of Vulkan 1.4, the introduction of a thoughtful deprecation mechanism, and the flourishing community-driven ecosystem have transformed Vulkan from a specialized low-level graphics API into a mature, future-focused platform for real-time 3D graphics and compute development. This evolution spans industries, operating systems, and GPU architectures, establishing Vulkan as the definitive choice for performance-critical applications.

Now is an ideal time to invest in Vulkan development. Whether you're launching your next game, architecting a CAD engine, or pioneering XR rendering solutions, Vulkan provides both the technical capabilities and vibrant community support to elevate your projects beyond what was previously possible.

The Khronos Vulkan Working Group welcomes feedback about Vulkan 1.4 through GitHub Vulkan-Docs repository. Developers are also encouraged to engage with the broader community by joining the Vulkan Discord channel and exploring additional support resources available at vulkan.org.