The Khronos Vulkan API is in continuous development, and today 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. These new features and more will be discussed at the forthcoming Vulkanised 2026 conference, taking place in San Diego on February 9-11.

The Khronos Vulkan API is in continuous development, and today 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.

These new features and more will be discussed at the forthcoming Vulkanised 2026 conference, taking place in San Diego on February 9-11.

Initial support for these features is expected in the next Vulkan SDK release planned for Q1 2026.

Descriptor Heaps: 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. This extension is intended to completely replace Vulkan’s existing descriptor set mechanism, and the working group is actively seeking developer feedback before finalizing the API as a KHR extension targeting a future Vulkan Roadmap milestone.

Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone: The latest roadmap milestone marks a significant increase in required functionality for high-end implementations beyond Vulkan 1.4 and previous milestones - requiring several long-standing optional features that developers have requested and raising a number of limits, including required support for:

  • Variable rate shading
  • Shader clock queries
  • Host image copies
  • Compute shader derivatives
  • Various swapchain improvements
  • Higher descriptor and shader interface limits

Most Vulkan adopters supporting the Vulkan 2026 milestone will offer conforming devices by the end of this year.

See the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone for full details.