Vulkan 1.4.337 released a short time ago as what could be the last Vulkan API spec update of 2025 depending upon how much time the working group takes off or not around the holidays. In any case, it’s a nice holiday treat with the new VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d and VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extensions.

Vulkan 1.4.337 has a handful of corrections and clarifications stemming from internally reported issues plus introducing the long vector and 3D ASTC compression extensions.

The new VK_EXT_shader_long_vector extension adds support for using vector types with more than four components in SPIR-V. This builds off SPIR-V’s SPV_EXT_long_vector work and is compatible with OpenGL/GLSL’s GL_EXT_long_vector extension. That GLSL long vector extension was just published two days ago and is awaiting merging to the GLSL repository.

VK_EXT_texture_compression_astc_3d is the other new extension and it adds support for 3D textures compressed using Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC). ASTC has been around for a while now though this support is just around the 3D texture format support.

More details on the Vulkan 1.4.337 spec update can be found via GitHub.

NVIDIA has already released a Vulkan beta driver update for supporting VK_EXT_shader_long_vector on Windows and Linux.