News Archives

Today, Khronos® is releasing a new multi-vendor Vulkan® extension that aims to radically simplify how applications specify shaders and shader state while maintaining Vulkan’s ethos of being a highly performant “API without secrets.” This extension is VK_EXT_shader_object. It introduces a new VkShaderEXT object type which represents a single compiled shader stage, along with 4 new functions to manipulate and use VkShaderEXT objects. Learn more in this Khronos Blog.

Built specifically for 3D content, gITF is lightweight and easy to process on any device or platform, including mobile phones and web browsers. The gITF textures can allow creators to take a JPEG-sized file and immediately unpack it into a native GPU solution, reducing both the memory required and data transmission times by 5 to 10 times. This can be crucial for delivering content to consumers as quickly as possible in the metaverse. 

Ultra Engine plans to use glTF for their main 3D model file format, so that final game models can be easily loaded back into a modeling program for editing whenever needed. glTF supports a lot of useful features and is widely supported, but there are a few missing pieces of information Ultra Engine need to add into it. Fortunately, this JSON-based file format has a mechanism for extensions that adds new features and data to the format. In this blog, the custom extensions added for Ultra Engine are explained.

The Khronos Group announces the creation of the SYCL SC Working Group to create a high-level heterogeneous computing framework for streamlining certification of safety-critical systems in automotive, avionics, medical, and industrial markets. SYCL SC will leverage the proven SYCL 2020 standard for parallel programming of diverse computing devices using standard C++17. Over the past year, the safety-critical community has gathered in the Khronos SYCL Safety-Critical Exploratory Forum to build consensus on use cases and industry requirements to catalyze and guide the design of this new open standard. The SYCL SC Working Group is open to any Khronos member, and Khronos membership is open to any company.

NVK is an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware that is part of Mesa. During Rebecca McKeever’s first three month’s at Collabora as an intern, she implemented several Vulkan API extensions for NVK, as well as contributed to the upstream Mesa project. She verified that the extensions met the specifications in the Vulkan API using the Vulkan Conformance Test suite (CTS). In this blog, she gives the results.

There is a strong need from third party developers to have a tutorial-style walkthrough on how to use OpenXR along with best practices. The Khronos Group has issued and RFP to develop these materials. Anyone is welcome to respond.

In an effort to further support the developer community, the Khronos Group has launched a new Discord server featuring many of its APIs. Khronos’ Vulkan Discord has had success over the past few years with membership nearing 4,000 users. After seeing the success of Vulkan Discord, Khronos has decided to bring the same level of community building to the whole of its offerings. Join today and help us build the community!

The agenda for IWOCL & SYCLcon 2023 has been announced! This premier event dedicated to developers using the OpenCL and SYCL APIs will take place in beautiful Cambridge, UK on April 18-20, 2023. It is a unique technical event bringing the developer community together to exchange ideas, solve problems and help steer the future development of the OpenCL and SYCL ecosystems. Early bird pricing is available until the end of March.

Godot 4.0 runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and also Android devices. The Goldot team embedded OpenXR in the engine’s core and introduced Godot XR tools, which will help developers of XR projects. With two new Vulkan backends (Clustered and Mobile), Godot rendering has never been so advanced. While Godot is excited to leverage Vulkan for performance optimization going forward, it was very important not to penalize users with less powerful hardware. For that, they’ve integrated an OpenGL-based compatibility renderer aimed at supporting older and lower-end devices. As always, Godot wants to see people create games on the full spectrum of devices for everyone to enjoy. They’re also working on a Direct3D 12 renderer for better Windows and Xbox support. With Je06jm‘s contribution, you can now also take advantage of AMD’s Fidelity FX Super Resolution 1.0 (FSR 1.0) to dynamically and beautifully render at lower resolution while keeping your game running smoothly. Spoiler: Support for FSR 2.1 is planned in future releases.

At The Polys - WebXR Awards, Patrick Cozzi received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on glTF and its use to enable an open and interoperable 3D ecosystem.

glTF is a 3D asset format developed by the Khronos Group that is widely adopted, including for use in 3D Commerce web and native applications. The 3D Commerce Working Group at Khronos brings together industry-leading e-commerce companies to remove the barriers to deploying 3D in e-commerce at industrial scale. Today, the Working Group has released the open source glTF Asset Auditor Tool for content creators throughout the 3D Commerce supply chain to use as part of their asset validation pipelines. By enabling rigorous asset QA to be consistently applied across companies, the amount of 3D model reworking can be greatly reduced while increasing compatibility and ease of use for downstream clients.

Although the glTF Asset Auditor has been initially created to address the needs of 3D Commerce, it works with any glTF file and can benefit any industry that needs to reliably deploy and use 3D assets at a pervasive scale. Read the blog to learn more.

In this educational paper from TU Wien, they conclude that supporting a Vulkan route was much less bumpy for their students than they initially anticipated, and therefore propose a pragmatic route for transitioning to Vulkan in academia for the purpose of teaching real-time computer graphics. Teaching Vulkan from the start will have a positive effect on students for becoming proficient users of modern graphics APIs and, thereby, in more advanced courses when they encounter Vulkan again. Using a low-level API enables students to learn about the massively parallel operation mode of modern GPUs early in their visual computing education. TU Wien’s evaluation has shown that students appreciate the skills and knowledge they picked up through using the Vulkan API. Teaching Vulkan is both viable and beneficial to students who aim to become competent practitioners of visual computing. While the transition may be challenging, it appears to be a worthwhile investment to provide students with future-proof education.