Cross-vendor Mesh Shading for the Vulkan API is now here

Today the Vulkan API specification 1.3.226 was released and it brings with it an exciting new extension with VK_EXT_mesh_shader. This was worked on by people from NVIDIA, Valve, Intel, ARM, QUALCOMM, Igalia and AMD.

This extension provides a new mechanism allowing applications to generate collections of geometric primitives via programmable mesh shading. It is an alternative to the existing programmable primitive shading pipeline, which relied on generating input primitives by a fixed function assembler as well as fixed function vertex fetch.

Vulkan API documentation

One of the reasons it's important, is that it not only brings cross-vendor mesh shading to Vulkan succeeding NVIDIA's own version, it also had a focus on improving compatibility with DirectX 12 so it brings us that little bit closer. Should hopefully be good for projects like Proton with VKD3D-Proton that translates Direct 3D 12 to Vulkan when running Windows games.

Compatibility with DirectX 12 was very important for this extension, therefore it follows the same capabilities, minimum limitations and restrictions.

Christoph Kubisch, Principal Developer Technology Engineer, NVIDIA

More info available on the Khronos Group blog post.

To go along with it, NVIDIA have a new Vulkan Beta Driver version 515.49.15 available with support hooked up and ready for testing. NVIDIA also updated their open source example to support it too. Hopefully Mesa drivers (AMD / Intel) will have it hooked up for Mesa 22.3 due later this year.