Now Available – Vulkan 1.4.304.1 SDKs
Released 7 Feb 2025
Today, we dropped a new Vulkan SDK for Windows, Linux, and macOS that adds significant new features across all three versions:
- A new version (v3) of the Vulkan Configurator that provides a ton of useful new features
- Improvements to GFXReconstruct that allow ray tracing capture/playback in a portable manner
- Documentation improvements that provide massive speedups in load times
- An updated version of slang containing a variety of bug fixes and improvements
Go to the Vulkan SDK Download site to get the new SDKs
Vulkan Configurator v3
Some of the big improvements to the Vulkan Configurator include:
- Numerous improvements to loading and selecting layers
- Improvements to layer ordering
- Enhancements to executable lists
- Additional logging support for Vulkan Loader
- UI and system diagnostics improvements
- Improvements to $(VULKAN_SDK) variable coverage
Note that previous versions of Vulkan Configurator will no longer be supported.
GFXReconstruct Support for Portable Ray Tracing
Device-independent capture and replay of ray tracing commands (capturing on one device and replaying on a different device) has proven challenging due to the differences in support for ray tracing functionality. GFXReconstruct now contains support for capture-time tracking of device buffer device addresses, shader group handles, and acceleration structures in order to correctly replay them later on a different device.
Antora version of Vulkan Specification
The Vulkan Working Group has developed a version of the Vulkan specification using Antora. With this release, the Antora-based version of the Vulkan specification has been integrated into the SDK version-specific specification of the LunarXchange SDK documentation. This greatly improves load times for documentation within a browser. The single file HTML version of the Vulkan Specification has been removed from the SDK due to serious usability issues. In a future SDK release, the “chunked” and PDF versions of the specification will also be removed.
Slang
An updated version of the Slang shading language compiler is included in this release. This version adds DescriptorHandle for bindless handle support.
Thank you!
LunarG would like to thank all the contributors to the Vulkan Ecosystem that help make the SDKs possible!
Release Notes
About LunarG
LunarG makes it easy for you to tap into the power of GPU processing without straying from your mission to deliver compelling software to your customers. We offer training, consulting, and developer tools for the GPU ecosystem. Vulkan-specific expertise includes performance analysis and tuning, runtime and tools development, shader optimizations, driver development, and porting engines and applications to Vulkan.
Visit the LunarG website to learn more.
