I've started learning about rendering using Rust and Vulkan (ash), and as a first step, I tried creating a “Hello Triangle.”

It seems very odd for GPU vendors not to have a 32DUnorm depth format. Is even worse that amd has no 24bit depth buffer.

To be honest, it does not seem to me that using floats for depth buffers is better than just using integers. For one, it makes working with polygon offsets quite weird. For second, is easier to make mistakes, and if you don't use reversed clip planes, is actually similar to 24bit unorm, while using (technically) 33% more data (even though I know 24bit would waste 8 bits, but 32bit unorm wouldn't).

I've been developing my own engine for years now and I've decided to go all in and implement GPU-driven rendering with per meshlet frustum (without mesh shaders), occlusion culling etc...

In order to even make it more performant, I've looked at some work graphs which unfortunately vulkan does not support them yet, but I stumpled upon an extension called VK_EXT_device_generated_commands.

This is a pretty "new" one (2022) but alas, there are no examples whatsoever... only example I've found is, this

https://github.com/nvpro-samples/vk_device_generated_cmds

I wanted to compare how much "performance" you can gain and benchmark it on my gpu but I was disappointed with the results. (see the result page of the github readme if you do not want to compile and test it yourself.). I compiled and ran the sample on my RTX 5090, but I saw roughly the same performance if not even worse than the other methods. In readme, it states that the performance can improve with newer drivers etc... however, considering it's now 2026, I don't expect its performance to change significantly anymore.

But, this post:

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/extremely-poor-vk-ext-device-generated-commands-performance/324189/8

made it clear that the sample isnt actually an apple to apple comparison at all.

has anyone here built a GPU-driven renderer using this extension? If so, was it worth the effort? Would you recommend implementing it in a renderer, or is it better to stick with more established approaches for now?

Thanks