Windows 11 on Arm machines is gaining market share with the release of new Snapdragon X Elite-based Copilot+ PCs. As a result, there is a growing interest among developers in tools for creating native games and applications for Copilot+ PCs. Vulkan, developed by the Khronos Group, is an open-standard low-level graphics API for creating graphics apps.
Today, a new Vulkan SDK beta version (v1.3.290.0) was released that will allow developers to build native Vulkan API apps for Windows on Arm. This beta release includes Arm64x layers for debugging x86_64 Vulkan binaries and a native Arm64 shader toolchain.
You can check out the demo of Vulkan SDK for Windows on Arm in the video below
Installing this new Vulkan SDK for Windows on Arm is identical to installing the standard Vulkan SDK for Windows. However, it won"t include the DXC library and executable, or the GFXReconstruct layer. These items will be available in future SDK versions. Also, the Vulkan Hardware Caps viewer native build for Windows on Arm will be released in the future. Since this new beta SDK does not have any changes to file names or libraries, porting apps and games to the ARM64 development environment will be relatively straightforward.
Developers with the following hardware and software requirements can get started with Vulkan development using the Vulkan SDK:
- Windows 11 ARM 64-bit OS
- Vulkan Installable Client Driver (ICD) from your GPU hardware vendor; the Vulkan Loader is delivered with the vendor"s driver package
- 8 GB memory
- Sufficient free disk space to install the Vulkan SDK (approximately 1 GB)
This release marks a significant step forward in expanding the Vulkan ecosystem to ARM-based Windows devices. With the growing popularity of Qualcomm Snapdragon-based Copilot+ PCs, this new Vulkan SDK empowers developers to create high-performance graphics applications optimized for this emerging platform.