Hey everyone! Today we are releasing our 2024 Ecosystem Survey Progress Report. This document describes how we’ve used the feedback you provided last year in our efforts to improve the Vulkan ecosystem.
A big part of running these surveys is making sure you all feel like your voices are being heard and that we’re actually doing something with the info you give us. We work on this every year to close the loop, which also gets folks excited to join in on the next survey right after we drop the yearly progress report. (And the 2025 survey is now live, so help us out by taking a few minutes to fill it out!)
In this blog post, we’ll hit the highlights of what we achieved over the last year, but do yourself a favor and check out the full report. There’s some cool notes in there on how your feedback shaped our work. Notably:
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Many of the accomplishments described below are thanks to the folks at LunarG, made possible with support from Valve and Google.
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The Khronos dev relations crew has been grinding away to improve the Vulkan specs, samples, and docs. (They are responsible for the awesome Antora work described below.)
- The Khronos Vulkan Working Group continues to explore options to reduce API verbosity and complexity.
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And let’s not forget the awesome open-source devs who’ve contributed so much.
Big shoutout to everyone for all we’ve done together over the last year!
Background
- The 2024 LunarG ecosystem survey was a collaborative effort between LunarG, Khronos developer relations, and Google to assess the Vulkan ecosystem’s health and developer satisfaction.
- The survey targeted a broad spectrum of Vulkan developers, both SDK users and non-users, through multiple channels including social media, developer communities (e.g., Reddit and Discord), professional networks, and direct email to over 13,000 recipients.
- Survey results from 2024 helped prioritize Vulkan implementation priorities and design decisions over the past year.
Vulkan Ecosystem Progress (Feb. 2024-Jan. 2025)
SDK Releases
The biggest contribution to ecosystem progress came from six Vulkan SDK releases over the last twelve months. Turning the crank on each release requires effort and coordination from a big team of people. Hundreds of improvements and bug fixes go into each release. Significant effort is required to curate and align almost 30 major components, test things, package them up, and make them available to thousands of users worldwide. The Vulkan SDK is now supported on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android. And it is downloaded 50,000 times every week! This level of usage makes it essential that every release is high quality.
In addition to the continuous improvements from six releases, here are some specific results achieved since the 2024 Ecosystem Survey.
Platform Support
- Windows 11 is now fully supported and is included in LunarG’s CI and SDK release test matrix.
- Added an SDK for ARM64 on Windows 11 and a script to enable Linux users to support ARM64.
- The macOS SDK is now dual platform (Apple Silicon/X86_64) and the installation can be automated more easily.
- Added iOS support to the macOS SDK.
SDK tools
- Significantly improved GFXReconstruct (improved support for Android, major performance improvements, added interactive analysis features, merged foundations of portable capture and replay of ray tracing).
- Included support for Slang to address the need for next generation shading languages.
- Added a new crash diagnostic layer to provide a straightforward method for diagnosing and fixing GPU hangs and crashes.
- Improved GPU-AV and Debug Printf so they can be used simultaneously and added support for 8-, 16-, and 64-bit float.
- Added debug labels and resource handles to error messages.
- The SDK documentation now includes an alternative version of the Vulkan specification built using Antora. This Antora-generated specification significantly reduces load times when accessed via a browser. Now, clicking a URL link from a validation layer error message will quickly direct you to the relevant VUID section in the Vulkan specification, bypassing the slow loading times associated with the HTML version. This feature is introduced in SDK version 1.4.304.1.
Validation
- Completed a significant amount of development for SPIR-V validation.
- Completed and released synchronization validation for the VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore extension.
- Modified the working group process to require validation layer support for new extensions coincident with their release.
- Completed all core validation rules for Vulkan 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2.
- Completed all ray tracing validation that can be done on the CPU.
Documentation and Samples
- Improved Vulkan documentation by adding a dark mode, improved searching, and eliminating dead links.
- Made significant additions to Vulkan’s shading language documentation.
- Added programming samples for raytracing, interoperability, video, and for six new extensions
Improved support for extension/feature queries.
Conclusion
Supporting an open-source initiative like the Vulkan SDK allows companies to innovate faster, reduce costs, and quickly develop enterprise-quality, cross-platform GPU software solutions. LunarG and our partners are proud of what we have accomplished on behalf of the Vulkan ecosystem in the last 12 months.
Let’s make 2025 another great year for the Vulkan API and the Vulkan SDK!
