News Archives

The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension that brings cross-vendor mesh shading to Vulkan and improves functional compatibility with DirectX 12. The new mesh shading pipeline with the task and mesh shading stages provides an alternative to the traditional vertex, tessellation, or geometry shader stages that feed into rasterization.

Mesh shaders provide greater flexibility to developers and enable a two-stage approach for efficient culling, level-of-detail management, and procedural generation of geometry. Compared to the traditional pipeline, mesh shaders enable easy access to the topology of generated primitives and developers are free to repurpose shader threads to perform both vertex shading and primitive shading workloads. Khronos will provide a mesh shader open-source sample to support and showcase the new VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension, and an updated shaderc library in the Vulkan SDK is coming soon.

For those that wish to try out the new mesh shader on their own GPU; NVIDIA is shipping the new extension in their beta Vulkan drivers today, and experimental support in the open source RADV and ANV drivers are now available.

For additional information developers are invited to:

• Read the deep-dive blog post Mesh Shading for Vulkan.
• Attend the free Vulkanised Webinar: ‘Cross-Vendor Mesh Shading with Vulkan’ on Wednesday October 27 September 28. Learn More and Register

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on version 1.1 of the 3D Tiles Community Standard, which is used for sharing, visualizing, fusing, and interacting with massive heterogenous 3D geospatial content across desktop, web, mobile – and now metaverse – applications. 3D Tiles v1.1 introduces new glTF extensions for fine-grained metadata storage and uses direct references to glTF content for closer integration with the glTF ecosystem. The candidate OGC Community Standard is identical to the Cesium release of version 1.1 of the 3D Tiles specification.  Comments are due by September 23, 2022.

Check out the new LunarG Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.3.224, including the NVIDIA Best Practices, a Vulkan Profiles tool to combine multiple profiles, and the Synchronization Validation inter-buffer-hazards feature (alpha).

In this EE Times Europe article, Neil Trevett describes how the need for graphics and compute acceleration in embedded markets is growing. Cameras and sensor arrays are increasingly central to many use cases in diverse industries, ranging from automotive to industrial, and are generating increasingly rich data streams that require sophisticated processing. At the same time, advanced user interfaces are being developed using high-quality 3D graphics and even augmented-reality technology. However, the need to deploy accelerated processing, combined with the complexities of safety-critical certification, has created a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries. That has driven up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.

Open standards have an important role in helping hardware and software vendors navigate this complex technology environment. Acceleration standards for the embedded market can enable cross-platform software reusability, decouple software and hardware development for easier deployment and integration of new components, provide cross-generation reusability, and facilitate field upgradability. Such standards reduce costs, shorten time to market, and lower the barriers to using advanced techniques such as inferencing and vision acceleration in compelling real-world products.

Ahead of Academy Software Foundation’s Open Source Days conference highlighting the latest in open source projects used for visual effects, animation, and image creation, the Academy Software Foundation welcomed two new members: Canonical and The Khronos Group. Launched in August 2018 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Linux Foundation, the Academy Software Foundation provides a neutral forum for open source software developers to share resources and collaborate on technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation and sound.

“Becoming a member of the Academy Software Foundation will enable us to further strengthen our relationship with the VFX and animation communities to ensure that Khronos standards adapt and evolve to better serve their requirements. Khronos is looking forward to sharing information with the experts in the ASWF membership and contributing to open source projects such as MaterialX, and fostering closer coordination with Khronos standards including glTF, OpenXR and Vulkan,” said Neil Trevett, President, Khronos Group.

Today the Khronos® Group announced that its glTF™ 2.0 specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D models has been released as the ISO/IEC 12113:2022 International Standard. Khronos has successfully completed the transposition of glTF 2.0 through the ISO/IEC JTC 1 PAS (Publicly Available Specification) Submission Process to solidify glTF’s global recognition and accelerate its adoption by industry and other standards. Khronos will continue to evolve glTF as a Khronos specification and regularly update ISO/IEC 12113 with proven, widely available glTF functionality to avoid industry fragmentation. The ISO/IEC 12113:2022 specification is available here.

For the past couple of years, the Raspberry Pi foundation has been working with Igalia to bring Vulkan to the Raspberry Pi 4 platform. Yesterday, they announced that they have achieved Vulkan 1.2 conformance for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B along with support for various other extensions, bug fixes and performance improvements.