Khronos Group Unveils New Open-Ended Vulkan Extension To Eliminate The Need For Pipelines

wccftech.com:

The Khronos Group revealed earlier this week that the Vulkan extension would permit multiple vendors an attempt to allow access to easily manage how software can "specify shaders and shader states." The new extension is changed to VK_EXT_shader_object, which will introduce "a new VkShaderEXT object type representing a single compiled shader stage," The company will add four new functions to use and adjust objects in the new Vulkan extension.

The dropping of pipelines for the Vulkan extension allows for more flexibility and simplicity when using shader objects, allowing vendors to choose to utilize only pipelines, shader objects, or a combination of both for each project.

Shader objects work in different ways than pipelines in that:

Khronos assures that implementing the Vulkan extension into a project will not hinder the project's performance. This is due to shader objects being more optimized than pipelines when it comes to affecting the processor and is negligible in negatively affecting the GPU. The company also notes that "CPU performance improvements from simpler application code using shader object APIs can outperform equivalent application code redesigned to use pipelines by enough that the performance improvements in the application outweigh the cost of extra implementation overhead."

Specific requirements of performance have been met by incorporating the VK_EXT_shader_object implementation:

The company anticipates that the new Vulkan extension will begin to see widespread adoption, which will help growth and allow for more improvements and additions over time. NVIDIA has a beta version of the new VK_EXT_shader_object in their latest driver on NVIDIA's Developer site. Khronos has also added a new layer implementing the