1. Preamble
Copyright 2014-2025 The Khronos Group Inc.
This Specification is protected by copyright laws and contains material proprietary to Khronos. Except as described by these terms, it or any components may not be reproduced, republished, distributed, transmitted, displayed, broadcast or otherwise exploited in any manner without the express prior written permission of Khronos.
Khronos grants a conditional copyright license to use and reproduce the unmodified Specification for any purpose, without fee or royalty, EXCEPT no licenses to any patent, trademark or other intellectual property rights are granted under these terms.
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This document contains extensions which are not ratified by Khronos, and as such is not a ratified Specification, though it contains text from (and is a superset of) the ratified Specification.
The ratified version of the Vulkan Specification can be found at https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/latest-ratified/pdf/vkspec.pdf (core with all ratified extensions).
This Specification contains substantially unmodified functionality from, and is a successor to, Khronos specifications including OpenGL, OpenGL ES and OpenCL.
The Khronos Intellectual Property Rights Policy defines the terms 'Scope', 'Compliant Portion', and 'Necessary Patent Claims'.
Some parts of this Specification are purely informative and so are EXCLUDED the Scope of this Specification. The Document Conventions section of the Introduction defines how these parts of the Specification are identified.
Where this Specification uses technical terminology, defined in the Glossary or otherwise, that refer to enabling technologies that are not expressly set forth in this Specification, those enabling technologies are EXCLUDED from the Scope of this Specification. For clarity, enabling technologies not disclosed with particularity in this Specification (e.g. semiconductor manufacturing technology, hardware architecture, processor architecture or microarchitecture, memory architecture, compiler technology, object oriented technology, basic operating system technology, compression technology, algorithms, and so on) are NOT to be considered expressly set forth; only those application program interfaces and data structures disclosed with particularity are included in the Scope of this Specification.
For purposes of the Khronos Intellectual Property Rights Policy as it relates to the definition of Necessary Patent Claims, all recommended or optional features, behaviors and functionality set forth in this Specification, if implemented, are considered to be included as Compliant Portions.
Where this Specification identifies specific sections of external references, only those specifically identified sections define normative functionality. The Khronos Intellectual Property Rights Policy excludes external references to materials and associated enabling technology not created by Khronos from the Scope of this Specification, and any licenses that may be required to implement such referenced materials and associated technologies must be obtained separately and may involve royalty payments.
Khronos and Vulkan are registered trademarks, and SPIR-V is a trademark of The Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc., used under license by Khronos. OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, used under license by Khronos. ASTC is a trademark of ARM Holdings PLC. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.