NVIDIA's new extension with Vulkan 1.3.245 is VK_NV_displacement_micromap, which for Vulkan ray-tracing can help with added detail in a memory efficient manner. The VK_NV_displacement_micromap spec sums up the new extension as:
"Ray tracing can very efficiently render from geometry which has very fine detail, but when using only a basic triangle representation, memory consumption can be an issue.
This extension adds the ability to add a "displacement map" to add more detail to triangles in an acceleration structure with an efficient in-memory format.
The format is externally visible to allow the application to compress its internal geometry representations into the compressed format ahead of time. This format adds displacements along a defined vector to subtriangle vertices which are subdivided from the main triangles."
VK_NV_displacement_micromap allows a displacement micromap structure to be attached to the geometry of the acceleration structure. As of Vulkan 1.3.245, this is just backed by NVIDIA and is also marked as a provisional extension that is subject to change. It will be interesting to see if other GPU vendors / driver developers get onboard with supporting this extension for potentially more efficient detailed Vulkan ray-tracing.
All of the details can be found via the v1.3.245 spec update . This extension is supported by the NVIDIA 525.47.14 Vulkan driver beta that NVIDIA released last week. They also issued a 525.47.15 update after that to improve the VK_NV_displacement_micromap support so it works better with prior generations of NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs.