LunarG recently made the new Vulkan Device Simulation layer public. This is a Vulkan instance level layer that injects physical device properties, limits and features based on a json input file, simulating different features than the actual Vulkan device you are running on. The idea behind this is to help developers check if their Vulkan applications can handle devices with missing features and tighter limits without having to actually run on a such a device. It’s not an emulation (like a software rasterizer, e.g. WARP for DirectX) and only affects queries against the device limits and features, so you can’t magically get e.g. tessellation support on a device that doesn’t support it by using this layer.
But still this is a nice addition to the Vulkan eco system and is especially handy for smaller devs that don’t own all the different devices they intend to run their applications on. With this layer you check your fallback paths and how your application handles missing device features.
Continue reading “The Vulkan Device Simulation Layer”
