Vulkan 1.4.351 has been released by the Khronos Group, introducing six new extensions. The highlight is VK_KHR_opacity_micromap, which improves ray-traced scenes by compactly encoding opacity information for geometry, reducing the need for costly tessellation or any-hit shaders. Other additions include VK_EXT_shader_split_barrier (splitting barrier operations for better subgroup synchronization, from Qualcomm/Intel/NVIDIA), VK_AMD_gpa_interface (AMD GPU performance counters and thread traces), and three Qualcomm-specific extensions: VK_QCOM_elapsed_timer_query (elapsed time queries), VK_QCOM_image_processing3 (image gather operations for super resolution and sharpening), and VK_QCOM_shader_multiple_wait_queues (loop optimization hint for SPIR-V).
