NVIDIA Vulkan Beta 525.47.07 supports extension to help VKD3D-Proton DXR

Seems like a future update of VKD3D-Proton that translates Direct3D 12 to Vulkan for Proton, for Windows games on Linux desktop and Steam Deck, will make use of a newer extension available in the new NVIDIA Vulkan Beta 525.47.07 release.

From the release notes for the new NVIDIA driver:

• New:
  • VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles
• Vulkan Video driver experiments:
  • Internally synchronize the picture VkVideoSessionParametersKHR while during parameter updates with vkUpdateVideoSessionParametersKHR
  • Allow for Picture Parameters like StdVideoH264PictureParameterSet, StdVideoH264SequenceParameterSet, StdVideoH265SequenceParameterSet, StdVideoH265PictureParameterSet and StdVideoH265VideoParameterSet to be optionally passed within vkCmdBeginVideoCodingKHR() and/or vkCmdDecodeVideoKHR() within VkVideoSessionParametersUpdateInfoKHR as an inlined extension structure
• Fixes:
  • Ignore VkPipelineColorBlendStateCreateInfo.pAttachments when all state is dynamic
  • Fix an issue with the video session picture parameters creation where the max PPS/SPS/VPS size is set to 1
• open-gpu-kernel-modules release:
  • https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/releases/tag/525.47.07

When you look into what that new extension does the documentation says:

When using pipeline libraries in ray tracing pipelines, a library might get linked into different pipelines in an incremental way. An application can have a strategy where a ray tracing pipeline is comprised of N pipeline libraries and is later augumented by creating a new pipeline with N + 1 libraries. Without this extension, all group handles must be re-queried as the group handle is tied to the pipeline, not the library. This is problematic for applications which aim to decouple construction of record buffers and the linkage of ray tracing pipelines.

To aid in this, this extension enables support for querying group handles directly from pipeline libraries. Group handles obtained from a library must remain bitwise identical in any VkPipeline that links to the library.

With this feature, the extension also improves compatibility with DXR 1.1 AddToStateObject(), which guarantees that group handles returned remain bitwise identical between parent and child pipelines. In addition, querying group handles from COLLECTION objects is also supported with that API.

The key point being the last paragraph, making it able to more closely match with DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) does. VKD3D-Proton added in support for it just recently too. Seems like support for this extension is not yet in the Mesa drivers for Intel and AMD just yet.