Intel Mesa driver for Linux is now Vulkan 1.1 conformant

It was only a few weeks ago when I posted that the Intel Mesa driver had successfully passed the Khronos OpenGL 4.6 conformance on day one, and now I am very proud that we can announce the same for the Intel Mesa Vulkan 1.1 driver, the new Vulkan API version announced by the Khronos Group last week. Big thanks to Intel for making Linux a first-class citizen for graphics APIs, and specially to Jason Ekstrand, who did most of the Vulkan 1.1 enablement in the driver.

At Igalia we are very proud of being a part of this: on the driver side, we have contributed the implementation of VK_KHR_16bit_storage, numerous bugfixes for issues raised by the Khronos Conformance Test Suite (CTS) and code reviews for some of the new Vulkan 1.1 features developed by Intel. On the CTS side, we have worked with other Khronos members in reviewing and testing additions to the test suite, identifying and providing fixes for issues in the tests as well as developing new tests.

Finally, I’d like to highlight the strong industry adoption of Vulkan: as stated in the Khronos press release, various other hardware vendors have already implemented conformant Vulkan 1.1 drivers, we are also seeing major 3D engines adopting and supporting Vulkan and AAA games that have already shipped with Vulkan-powered graphics. There is no doubt that this is only the beginning and that we will be seeing a lot more of Vulkan in the coming years, so look forward to it!

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