LunarG has now officially rolled out 'DevSim', a rather fancy tool for developers to test their Vulkan games and applications against many different configurations.

Why is this interesting? Well, not every developer will have access to tens (and more) different GPUs. With DevSim, they technically don't need to, as they can use it to simulate various different configurations.

Here's how they describe it (read more in their news post):

The LunarG Device Simulation layer helps test across a wide range of hardware capabilities without requiring a physical copy of every device. It can be applied without modifying any application binaries, and in a fully-automated fashion. The Device Simulation layer (aka DevSim) is a Vulkan layer that can override the values returned by your application’s queries of the GPU. DevSim uses a JSON text configuration file to make your application see a different driver/GPU than is actually in your system. This capability is useful to verify that your application both a) properly queries the limits from Vulkan, and b) obeys those limits.

It's free as well, with the source included in their VulkanTools repository on GitHub.

Fantastic to see more like this out there for Vulkan, hopefully the more we see like this, the easier and more likely it will be for developers to use Vulkan, which can help bringing games to Linux become a bit easier.