News Archives

AMD's GPUOpen group has released their first beta of the Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.1 release after "many months of development" and as such comes with many new features. VulkanMemoryAllocator is the open-source AMD effort to provide an easy-to-use and integrate Vulkan memory allocation library to ease the process of bringing up new Vulkan code.

Intel’s driver team has published a new graphics driver for all recent GPUs (Intel 6th, 7th and 8th Gen processors) on Windows 10. This driver version exposes Vulkan 1.1.82, and continues to support OpenGL 4.5, exposing the same OpenGL support as v4944 (245 OpenGL extensions). Direct download from Intel is here.

Stardock Entertainment announced the extension of their technology and gaming partnership with AMD. As part of the ongoing partnership, Stardock will optimize the upcoming Star Control: Origins for AMD technologies including AMD Ryzen processors and Radeon FreeSync 2 technology, as well as update the game post-launch with support for the Vulkan™ Graphics API.

Intel has introduced the next part of their Vulkan API-related series of articles. In the Introduction to Vulkan* tutorial, they taught the most important basics. This part of the tutorial will show you how to use your current knowledge to display more complicated scenes.

In March, AMD announced the V-EZ Vulkan wrapper, with an aim to make Vulkan development easier. A few days ago it appears that AMD has moved the V-EZ wrapper to open source: "V-EZ is an open source, cross-platform (Windows and Linux) wrapper intended to alleviate the inherent complexity and application responsibility of using the Vulkan API. V-EZ attempts to bridge the gap between traditional graphics APIs and Vulkan by providing similar semantics to Vulkan while lowering the barrier to entry and providing an easier to use API." (source: GamingOnLinux).

Codeplay's ComputeCpp 1.0 enables SYCL and provides C++ developers with 'High Performance Computing', 'Computer Vision' and 'Artificial Intelligence'. "Codeplay continues to lead the SYCL community, as demonstrated by the release of ComputeCpp 1.0 featuring the industry's first fully conformant SYCL 1.2.1 implementation," said Codeplay's Michael Wong, chair of the SYCL working group and senior member of the ISO C++ Standards committee. "This latest release will empower developers to more easily harness the power of heterogeneous computing. It also helps improve the experience for developers by making it easy to write applications that can take greater advantage of the compute capabilities present in a range of CPUs, GPUs, and other processor types." Learn more about ComputeCpp 1.0 and SYCL, or read up on the history of Codeplay and SYCL.

Valve released the Beta of a new and improved version of Steam Play to all Linux users. The Beta version includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles. Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support. DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, resulting in improved game compatibility and reduced performance impact. There are a lot of details in this announcement, be sure to read the entry over on the Steam Community website.

Recent work from Boston University has shown that with key optimizations that leverage OpenCL on Arria 10 FPGAs for 3D fast fourier transforms (FFTs), a common HPC workload, the performance can beat out FFT specific IP cores as well as GPU and CPU implementations of the same problem.

Fusion3D is a new open source 3D engine currently being developed. It is written in C++ (Using Visual Studio 2017), and is built around the Vulkan API. Fusion3D will support hybrid rendering using the new Nvidia RTX cards, which means your scenes and games can be rendered both with ray-tracing and rasterization techniques. Everyone is welcome to help work on development of this game engine. The project is located on SourceForge and GitHub.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome its newest Associate Member Almalence Inc. Almalence develops computational lens correction technology aimed at improving optical performance of design-constrained VR/AR lenses. While adding no size or weight to the HMD, Almalence Digital Lens enables to achieve high resolution and remove aberrations across the entire field of view and at any gaze direction.

We are live streaming the Khronos SIGGRAPH BOFs on YouTube this year. They are now underway. Hope you can join us!

NVIDIA announced Nsight Graphics 2018.4, the first public release of GPU Trace. This release also adds D3D12 Pixel history, supports NVIDIA’s Vulkan ray tracing extension, completes support for the D3D12 RS3 SDK, and improves performance for D3D11 and Vulkan debugging and profiling. Additionally, with this release, the Nsight family of tools is being re-versioned to a year dot release number versioning scheme.

At SIGGRAPH we’re excited to show the first demonstration of the OpenXR standard. It’ll be shown with a StarVR headset and a Microsoft Mixed Reality headset working through the OpenXR runtime through a plugin for Unreal Engine 4. The main demo will be at the Khronos BOF session: Standardizing All the Realities: A Look at OpenXR, at 1 p.m. on August 15, and another demo will be shown throughout the show at the StarVR booth (#412). Those interested in attending can see more information on our website.

The Khronos Group announces updates to key standards and opens the Khronos Education Forum at SIGGRAPH. With various Khronos events throughout the week, including a day of Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions and its annual networking reception, Khronos is accelerating open standards ecosystems and continuing its commitment to the SIGGRAPH community of interactive graphics professionals. At SIGGRAPH, Khronos will be talking about the following standards developments and initiatives: NNEF 1.0 Specification Finalized, OpenXR Demonstrates Specification in Hardware Implementation, Ecosystem Grows; New Extensions Released and a Call for Participation - Education Forum Opens for Public Contribution. In addition to standards updates, The Khronos Group is hosting educational sessions and networking events this week, including a full-day of BOF sessions with talks from various members.

The Khronos Group announces the ratification and the public release of the NNEF™ 1.0 (Neural Network Exchange Format) specification. After gathering feedback from the industry review of the provisional specification, Khronos releases NNEF 1.0 as a stable, flexible, and extensible open standard for hardware manufacturers to reliably deploy optimized, accelerated neural network inferencing onto diverse edge devices. Together with this release, an ecosystem of tools is now also available on GitHub, including an NNEF parser and converters from Tensorflow and Caffe. Importers into popular inferencing environments, including Android’s Neural Network API (NNAPI) and Khronos’ OpenVX™, are also being developed.