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February 9-11 | San Diego, USAVulkanised 2026

The premier conference for Vulkan developers

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Announcing the release of Vulkan 1.4Vulkan 1.4

Khronos Streamlines Development and Deployment of GPU-Accelerated Applications. Vulkan 1.4 integrates and mandates support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms

Vulkan 1.4 Press Release

Half Life: Alyx - Valve

Vulkan for VRHalf-Life: Alyx

Half-Life: Alyx is Valve’s VR return to the Half-Life series. It’s the story of an impossible fight against a vicious alien race known as the Combine, set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Playing as Alyx Vance, you are humanity’s only chance for survival.

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Path of Exile - Grinding Gear Games

Available on PC and macOS with VulkanPath of Exile

Path of Exile is a free-to-play online Action RPG set in the dark fantasy world of Wraeclast. Available on PC, macOS with Vulkan.

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Khronos welcomes community contributions

Contributing

There are many ways community members can contribute to Vulkan ranging from joining Khronos as a member, making suggestions for the Vulkan spec via Github or contributing to the many open source software and tools projects. Here are a few pointers to how to get started:

Khronos welcomes community contributions

Contributing

There are many ways community members can contribute to Vulkan ranging from joining Khronos as a member, making suggestions for the Vulkan spec via Github or contributing to the many open source software and tools projects. Here are a few pointers to how to get started:

• Join Khronos as a Member
  • Promoter/contributor levels: Directly influence the Vulkan spec (with voting rights)
  • Associate/Academic/Not-for-Profit levels: Advise the Working Group on future evolution topics (no voting rights)

  Find Out More

• Vulkan on GitHub

  Khronos maintains several public GitHub repos for Vulkan - please follow the contributing and licensing guidelines listed on the repos:

  • The Vulkan specification (Vulkan_docs)
  • Vulkan Guide (vulkan_guide)
  • Khronos Vulkan Tutorial (vulkan_tutorial)
  • Vulkan samples (vulkan_samples)
  • docs.vulkan.org website (vulkan_site)
  • Many tools, layers, profiles, etc.

  The public community can contribute via

  • Submitting issues
  • Suggesting improvements

  Find Out More

• Contribute to the many community supported open source Vulkan projects
  • Engines
  • Frameworks
  • Libraries
  • Language bindings

  Find Out More

• Roadmap Suggestions
  • Vulkan Roadmap "proposal" (for background on Vulkan Roadmaps)

    The Vulkan working group welcomes input from the developer community on challenges that you would like to see targeted in future Vulkan Roadmap milestones. If you have significant problems you’d like to see solved, major pain points that need addressing, improvements to streamline development, etc., your feedback will help guide the development of new solutions.

  • Submit a "Roadmap Feedback" issue on Vulkan-Docs

    Open an issue (or comment on an existing Roadmap Feedback issue) on the Vulkan-Docs Github repo using the Roadmap Feedback issue template. See issue #2220 for an example.

  • Discord channel for roadmap ideas

    Go to #vulkan-roadmap-discussions on the official Vulkan Discord and post suggested roadmap improvements to seed discussions with other Vulkan developers and Work Group members

Vulkan Platform Support

Vulkan is a cross-platform industry standard enabling developers to target a wide range of devices with the same graphics API.

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Vulkan Developments

Latest Vulkan API Extensions and Additions

Vulkan is constantly evolving to bring new capabilities and improvements to the API. Here are some of the most recent developments

Baldur's Gate 3 - Larian Studios

Vulkan Developments

Latest Vulkan API Extensions and Additions

Vulkan is constantly evolving to bring new capabilities and improvements to the API. Here are some of the most recent developments

• Vulkan 1.4 Specification
  • Vulkan 1.4 Specification

    The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles

  • Read the press release

    Khronos Streamlines Development and Deployment of GPU-Accelerated Applications with Vulkan 1.4

• Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Released
  • Press Release

    The Vulkan Working Group has released two important updates to the API and ecosystem: an entirely new Descriptor system and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone.

  • Roadmap 2026 Specification

    This milestone raises the baseline feature support of Vulkan implementations as with prior milestones. In addition, this milestone makes guarantees about swapchain and presentation support for implementations.

• Descriptor Heaps
  • Read the blog

    The new VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension represents a complete overhaul of the current Vulkan descriptor system, providing direct access to descriptor memory while preserving compatibility with legacy descriptor sets and other APIs.

  • Spec Proposal Document

    This document outlines a proposal to make the management of descriptor memory more explicit, allowing descriptors to be present in buffer memory, allowing the data and memory to be managed alongside other buffer objects.

• Video - Finalized Extensions Released!
  • Press Release

    Khronos has released finalized extensions, collectively called ‘Vulkan Video’, for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. This API incorporates industry feedback and exposes core decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.

  • Vulkan Video Blog - Decode

    Vulkan Video adheres to the Vulkan philosophy of providing applications flexible, fine-grained control over scheduling, synchronization, and memory allocation. By leveraging the existing Vulkan API framework, the Vulkan Video extensions enable efficient, low-latency, low-overhead use of processing resources for accelerated video processing.

  • Vulkan Video Blog - Encode

    With the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams.

  • Vulkan Video Blog - AV1 Decode

    Khronos Releases AV1 Decode in Vulkan Video with SDK Support for H.264/H.265 Encode

• Synchronization 2
  • Overview Blog

    The newly released VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension brings extensive improvements to Vulkan queue submission, events, and pipeline barriers to significantly improve API usability for developers.

  • Technical Blog

    The goal of this article is to help developers easily understand and not be intimidated or confused by one of the toughest aspects of Vulkan: Synchronization.

  • Synchronization 2 in the Vulkan Guide

    See this chapter in the Vulkan Guide for an overview of the latest Vulkan synchronization capabilities

  • Specification

    See the details of VK_KHR_synchronization2 in the Vulkan specification

  • Synchronization 2 code sample

    Demonstrates the use of the reworked synchronization api introduced with VK_KHR_synchronization2. This sample uses the new extension to streamline memory barriers used for compute and graphics work submissions.

• Ray Tracing
  • Read the Blog

    Khronos® has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan®, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the existing Vulkan framework.

  • Ray Tracing in the Vulkan Guide

    For an overview of Ray Tracing in Vulkan, check out this chapter in the Vulkan Guide

  • Specification

    Start with the Ray Traversal and Ray Tracing sections of the Vulkan Spec for more details

  • Ray Tracing code sample

    Render a basic scene using the official cross-vendor ray tracing extension. Shows how to setup all data structures required for ray tracing

• Timeline Semaphores
  • Read the Blog

    The new timeline semaphore synchronization API defines a primitive containing a superset of both the original VkSemaphore and VkFence primitives while simultaneously eliminating many of the most painful limitations of the previous APIs

  • Specification

    See detials for Timeline Semaphore in the Vulkan Specification

  • Timeline Semaphore code sample

    Demonstrates various use cases which are enabled with timeline semaphores. The sample implements "Game of Life" using out-of-order signal and wait, multiple waits on same semaphore in different queues, waiting and signalling semaphore on host.

• Fragment Shading Rate
  • Read the blog

    The VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension provides a new, flexible technique to control the fragment shading rate, enabling developers to perform shading at a lower resolution than the render targets.

  • Specification

    See detials for VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate in the Vulkan Specification

  • Fragment Shading Rate code sample

    Uses a special framebuffer attachment to control fragment shading rates for different framebuffer regions. This allows explicit control over the number of fragment shader invocations for each pixel covered by a fragment

• Descriptor Indexing for Mobile
  • Read the blog

    Android is enabling a host of useful new Vulkan extensions for mobile. These new extensions are set to improve the state of graphics APIs for modern applications, enabling new use cases and changing how developers can design graphics renderers going forward.

  • Specification

    See details for Descriptor Indexing in the Vulkan Specification

  • Descriptor Indexing code sample

    Demonstrates how to use descriptor indexing to enable update-after-bind and non-dynamically uniform indexing of descriptors

New to Graphics Programming?

If you're just starting out in your Graphics Programming journey, we've listed a few recommended resources to help get you spun up on the basics.

Learn more

Marek Okon - Unsplash

Community

Join Our Community

There are several ways to follow the latest Vulkan developments, get questions answered and make suggestions for improvement.

You'll find thriving Vulkan community discussions on several forums and social media platforms below. It's a great way to get involved!

Latest project

Vulkan Portability

Vulkan® Portability™ aims to counter platform fragmentation by encouraging layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal, DX12 and other APIs. Vulkan Portability enables Vulkan applications to be reliably deployed across diverse platforms

Learn more

Latest project

Vulkan SC

The release of the Vulkan SC 1.0 specification on March 1, 2022 marked an important milestone in delivering a new generation of safety-critical APIs. Based on the Vulkan 1.2 API, Vulkan SC meets the needs of safety-critical systems to leverage the performance of modern GPUs to satisfy their graphics and compute requirements.

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Events

Upcoming Events

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Vulkanised 2027

March 4, 2026

Read More Vulkanised 2026

February 13, 2026 - March 4, 2026

Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan API and is a unique technical event that brings the Vulkan developer community together to exchange ideas, solve problems and help steer the future development of the Vulkan API and ecosystem. Read More News

The Latest on Vulkan

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New Vulkan Game Engine Tutorial: Build Your Own Production-Ready Rendering Engine The Vulkan Working Group has published Building a Simple Game Engine, a new in-depth tutorial for developers ready to move beyond the basics and into professional-grade engine development. The series builds on the Core Vulkan Tutorial, guiding you through architectural principles and design patterns purpose-built for Vulkan-based rendering engines — helping you design clean, modular systems that scale with your project.

February 25th at 1:56pm

Read More Minecraft Switches to Vulkan for Virbrant Visuals Minecraft: Java Edition is hard at work getting Vibrant Visuals ready. They have been exploring refactoring and looking at ways to modernize their rendering code. Following this work, they are now preparing to make a change to the underlying technology they use to render the game, by switching from OpenGL to Vulkan.

February 19th at 4:12pm

Read More Minecraft Switches to Vulkan for Vibrant Visuals Minecraft: Java Edition is hard at work getting Vibrant Visuals ready. They have been exploring refactoring and looking at ways to modernize their rendering code. Following this work, they are now preparing to make a change to the underlying technology they use to render the game, by switching from OpenGL to Vulkan.

February 19th at 4:12pm

Read More Mesa 26.0 Released with Many Vulkan Driver Improvements The Mesa 26.0 open-source graphics stack has been released as a major update that introduces new features and improvements across most of the included graphics drivers. Highlights of Mesa 26.0 include KosmicKrisp, a new Vulkan to Metal layered driver for macOS, significant raytracing performance improvements to the RADV Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, and other Vulkan improvements.

February 12th at 12:20am

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