• Vulkan 1.4.344 Released With New Extension From Valve Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. • Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers. • The new extension introduced by Vulkan 1.4.344 is VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product. • Valve’s Mike Blumenkrantz and Georg Lehmann worked on the VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product extension. • With VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product is the ability to use mixed precision dot product accumulate operations in shaders. • The VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product extension depends upon a new SPIR-V extension, SPV_VALVE_mixed_float_dot_product.
Article Summaries:
- Vulkan 1.4.344, the latest routine update for the high‑performance graphics and compute API, was released today. The revision includes a handful of fixes and clarifications, but its headline feature is a new Valve‑sponsored extension, VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product. This extension enables shaders to perform mixed‑precision dot‑product accumulation, improving performance on low‑precision inputs. It relies on a new SPIR‑V extension, SPV_VALVE_mixed_float_dot_product, which initially supports four combinations of input and accumulation precisions: 16‑bit floats with 32‑bit or 16‑bit accumulation, bfloat16 with 32‑bit or bfloat16 accumulation, and 8‑bit floats with 32‑bit accumulation. Full spec details are available on GitHub.
Sources: