A Dive into Vulkanised 2024

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Last week I had an exciting opportunity to attend the Vulkanised 2024 +conference. For those of you not familar with the event, it is “The Premier Vulkan +Developer Conference” hosted by the Vulkan working group from +Khronos. With the excitement out of the way, I decided to write about +some of the interesting information that came out of the conference.

A Few Presentations

My colleagues Iago, Stéphane, and Hyunjun each had the opportunity to +present on some of their work into the wider Vulkan ecosystem.

Stéphane & Hyunjun presented “Implementing a Vulkan Video Encoder +From Mesa to Streamer”. They jointly talked about the work they +performed to implement the Vulkan video extensions in Intel’s ANV Mesa +driver as well as in GStreamer. This was an interesting presentation +because you got to see how the new Vulkan video extensions affected both +driver developers implementing the extensions and application developers +making use of the extensions for real time video decoding and encoding. +Their +presentation is available on vulkan.org.

Later my colleague Iago presented jointly with Faith Ekstrand (a +well-known Linux graphic stack contributor from Collabora) on “8 Years +of Open Drivers, including the State of Vulkan in Mesa”. They both +talked about the current state of Vulkan in the open source driver +ecosystem, and some of the benefits open source drivers have been able +to take advantage of, like the common Vulkan runtime code and a shared +compiler stack. You can check out their +presentation for all the details.

Besides Igalia’s presentations, there were several more which I found +interesting, with topics such as Vulkan developer tools, experiences of +using Vulkan in real work applications, and even how to teach Vulkan to +new developers. Here are some highlights for some of them.

Using +Vulkan Synchronization Validation Effectively

John Zulauf had a presentation of the Vulkan synchronization +validation layers that he has been working on. If you are not familiar +with these, then you should really check them out. They work by tracking +how resources are used inside Vulkan and providing error messages with +some hints if you use a resource in a way where it is not synchronized +properly. It can’t catch every error, but it’s a great tool in the +toolbelt of Vulkan developers to make their lives easier when it comes +to debugging synchronization issues. As John said in the presentation, +synchronization in Vulkan is hard, and nearly every application he +tested the layers on reveled a synchronization issue, no matter how +simple it was. He can proudly say he is a vkQuake contributor now +because of these layers.

6 +Years of Teaching Vulkan with Example for Video Extensions

This was an interesting presentation from a professor at the +university of Vienna about his experience teaching graphics as well as +game development to students who may have little real programming +experience. He covered the techniques he uses to make learning easier as +well as resources that he uses. This would be a great presentation to +check out if you’re trying to teach Vulkan to others.

Vulkan +Synchronization Made Easy

Another presentation focused on Vulkan sync, but instead of debugging +it, Grigory showed how his graphics library abstracts sync away from the +user without implementing a render graph. He presented an interesting +technique that is similar to how the sync validation layers work when it +comes ensuring that resources are always synchronized before use. If +you’re building your own engine in Vulkan, this is definitely something +worth checking out.

Vulkan +Video Encode API: A Deep Dive

Tony at Nvidia did a deep dive into the new Vulkan Video extensions, +explaining a bit about how video codecs work, and also including a +roadmap for future codec support in the video extensions. Especially +interesting for us was that he made a nice call-out to Igalia and our +work on Vulkan Video CTS and open source driver support on slide (6) +:)

Thoughts on Vulkanised

Vulkanised is an interesting conference that gives you the +intersection of people working on Vulkan drivers, game developers using +Vulkan for their graphics backend, visual FX tool developers using +Vulkan-based tools in their pipeline, industrial application developers +using Vulkan for some embedded commercial systems, and general hobbyists +who are just interested in Vulkan. As an example of some of these +interesting audience members, I got to talk with a member of the Blender +foundation about his work on the Vulkan backend to Blender.

Lastly the event was held at Google’s offices in Sunnyvale. Which I’m +always happy to travel to, not just for the better weather (coming from +Canada), but also for the amazing restaurants and food that’s in the Bay +Area!