News Archives

The Graphics Programming Conference is a new conference taking place November 12-14 in The Netherlands. The conference will bring together graphics programmers, technical directors, graphics researchers, game developers, academia, and students. The conference’s schedule features several Vulkan-related events. Visit our event page to learn more.

Join our next WebGL & WebGPU Virtual Meetup on Tuesday, November 5th. We have an exciting lineup including the latest news from the Working Groups and presentations. The meetup will conclude with a lively Q&A session, so bring your questions for the experts!

Sony Electronics has released SDK version 2.4.0 for its Spatial Reality Displays, delivering powerful new tools and features designed to elevate the 3D-content creation and display experience. With the addition of multi-display support, viewer log functionality, and extended development platform compatibility, this update empowers content creators to produce even more immersive and high-impact 3D content.

Sony has expanded support for leading development platforms. SDK 2.4.0 enhances application development by expanding support for key platforms, including:

• Extended OpenXR compatibility
• Unreal Engine 5.4
• Unity Plugin DX1

These advancements make it easier for developers to integrate the Spatial Reality Display into existing workflows, enabling the creation of highly realistic 3D content with more intuitive, efficient development processes.

This year, the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group has reached several significant milestones along the roadmap for developing glTF into an interoperable spatial computing format, and has several extension development efforts underway. Many key extensions for spatial consistency, improved material rendering and consistent render fidelity have now reached the Review Draft stage, where they are ready for detailed review and initial testing. There are also several new extensions in the Initial Draft phase, where the Working Group is seeking directional input to ensure specification development aligns with the community’s needs. We are cranking and getting work done!

This blog will review recent ecosystem updates, explain current specs nearing release candidacy, and highlight opportunities for community input, inviting glTF stakeholders to share useful feedback to shape the future development of the glTF ecosystem.

The Khronos OpenCL Working Group is happy to announce the release of the OpenCL v3.0.17. This maintenance update addresses numerous bug fixes and clarifications, and delivers important improvements across several areas:

• Enhancements and corrections to the cl_khr_external_memory and cl_khr_external_semaphore extensions, informed by additional implementation experience and testing.
• Additions of support for importing NT handles by name to the cl_khr_external_memory and cl_khr_external_semaphores extensions for Windows.
• Usability improvements for the provisional cl_khr_command_buffer_mutable_dispatch extension, enabling update configurations to be passed as arrays rather than linked lists.

The latest specifications are available at the Khronos OpenCL Registry.

The Vulkan Working Group have released the VK_EXT_present_mode_fifo_latest_ready extension that introduces a new present mode in Vulkan that is closer in semantics to what some platforms can offer when wanting to expose a mailbox-like present mode. With VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_LATEST_READY_EXT the presentation engine has a presentation queue similar to the existing VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_KHR. However, it only displays the most recently completed presentation request in that queue and releases the images associated with the older requests when starting a new refresh cycle.  For additional information see the GitHub Extensions Proposal Document.

The VRM Consortium, Inc., the creator and advocate of the VRM 3D avatar file format, which is based on the glTF 2.0 open standard, has announced a collaboration with The Khronos Group to advance the international standardization of VRM. Both parties will work together to develop the VRM and glTF formats as global open standards supporting interoperable 3D avatars.

If you are developing, testing, or using OpenCL applications, you are likely aiming to harness the power of heterogeneous computing. OpenCL enables the acceleration of general-purpose workloads by executing them on the GPU, but what about workloads within a virtual machine? Is it possible to leverage OpenCL to accelerate those workloads on the physical GPU? And how would one achieve this?

This blog post examines VirtIO-GPU, a VirtIO-based graphics adapter, and VCL, an OpenCL driver by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. for VirtIO-GPU. Using VCL, you can leverage the host’s graphics hardware to speed up OpenCL applications in guest virtual machines.

AMD has added mesh nodes to their Vulkan experimental extension, VK_AMDX_shader_enqueue. With mesh nodes available in a Work Graph, dispatching a single payload can kick off a variety of compute and rendering tasks, completely driven by the GPU. This update also brings support for the Work Graph HLSL syntax. Although Work Graphs are a experimental feature in Vulkan at this time, AMD is committed to its development.

Learn to integrate modern rendering techniques into a 3D real-time rendering engine with the new Vulkan 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook being released January 9th. Per-order your copy today! (also available for the Kindle)

This week LunarG released a new Vulkan SDK for Windows, Linux, & macOS that supports Vulkan API revision 1.3.296.0. This release contains a beta version of slang.

Blender 4.3 provides initial support for rendering the Blender UI using the Vulkan API on Windows and Linux. It is treated as experimental and initially focused on feature parity and stability. Over time, more performance work is expected on the Blender Vulkan UI.

The new release adds support for new extensions, including device generated commands and pipeline binaries. It also includes some MacOS and iOS fixes.