Specification tagged news

Today, The Khronos® Group announces the ratification of KTX™ 2.0, adding support for Basis Universal supercompression to this container format for reliable, ubiquitous distribution of GPU textures. Basis Universal is a compression technology developed by Binomial that produces compact textures that can be efficiently transcoded to a variety of GPU compressed texture formats at run-time. Additionally, Khronos has released the KHR_texture_basisu extension enabling glTF to contain KTX 2.0 textures, resulting in universally distributable glTF assets that reduce download size and use natively supported texture formats to reduce GPU memory size and boost rendering speed on diverse devices and platforms. Lastly, Khronos has released open source tools and transcoders, together with developer and artist guidelines, to enable and encourage widespread usage of KTX 2.0 textures throughout the glTF ecosystem, including the three.js, Babylon.js and Gestaltor viewers that have already integrated support.

The Vulkan Working Group has just released the VK_KHR_performance_query extension, which provides a cross-vendor common mechanism to expose performance metrics. These may be used to obtain data from a Vulkan device, typically a graphics card or SoC, to measure the workload demand and assess the impact of application modifications and optimizations.

The Khronos Group today announces the creation of the Vulkan Safety Critical Working Group, to enable safety critical industries to take advantage of advancements in GPU graphics and compute acceleration, and display control, at the highest levels of safety integrity. Safety critical graphics are a key component for industries such as automotive, avionics, medical and energy. As display requirements become more advanced, safety critical graphics APIs must evolve to meet the industries’ needs. Now, automotive and other industries are seeking advanced GPU graphics, compute and display functionality that can be deployed in safety critical systems. In response to this industry demand, this new Khronos Working Group will create open, royalty-free API standards based on the existing Vulkan API specification to enable safety critical industries to utilize advanced graphics and compute acceleration. To best suit these market’s needs, the new API will aim to be compatible with industry standards for safety critical software, such as RTCA DO-178C Level A / EASA ED-12C Level A (avionics); FACE (Future Airborne Capability Environment) (avionics); and ISO 26262 ASIL D (automotive).

The Khronos Group is looking for feedback on the latest draft of the KTX2 texture file format specification. Please review and comment on GitHub.

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.

The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the launch of the OpenGL® 4.6 Adopters Program to enable implementations to become officially conformant to the latest generation OpenGL specification. The significantly enhanced OpenGL 4.6 Conformance Test Suite used in the Adopters Program has been released in open source on GitHub to enable industry participation in testing and ongoing conformance test suite improvements. General information on Khronos Adopters Programs can be found here.

The Khronos Group announces from the SIGGRAPH 2017 Conference the immediate public availability of the OpenGL 4.6 specification. OpenGL 4.6 integrates the functionality of numerous ARB and EXT extensions created by Khronos members AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA into core, including the capability to ingest SPIR-V shaders. Learn more about this release. Khronos encourages and welcomes all feedback on the new specification.

The Vulkan working group has released a major Vulkan 1.0 specification update that adds eighteen new KHR extensions. They include KHR replacements for the experimental KHX_external_memory_* and KHX_external_semaphore_* extensions released earlier this year, incorporating changes based on developer and implementer feedback. The release also adds a set of KHR_external_fence_* extensions. Together, these extensions allow applications to share memory and synchronization primitives across process and API boundaries. Two new extensions, KHR_dedicated_allocation and KHR_get_memory_requirements2, provide more expressive and extensible ways for applications to optimize their GPU memory allocation policies. KHR_16bit_storage, KHR_storage_buffer_storage_class, and KHR_variable_pointer allow Vulkan implementations to accept shader programs containing new programming constructs recently added to the SPIR-V intermediate shading language.

The new extensions are accompanied by a new release of the Vulkan 1.0 conformance test that checks that the new extensions are implemented correctly, and a new Vulkan SDK that provides loader and validation support and a snapshot of a compatible release of the GLSLang shader compiler. All of the new extensions are supported in the latest NVIDIA drivers, and support from other GPU vendors is in progress.

For more information, see the Vulkan Changelog

The Khronos™ Group announces from the Web3D 2017 Conference the immediate availability of the finalized glTF 2.0 specification incorporating industry feedback received from developers through the provisional specification that was made available for review on GitHub.

The Khronos Group announces the immediate release of the OpenVX 1.2 specification for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision applications and libraries. OpenVX is a high-level, graph-based API targeted at real-time mobile and embedded platforms. This open, cross-platform, royalty-free standard enables performance-portable, power-optimized computer vision applications such as face, body, and gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, autonomous driver assistance systems, visual inspection, and robotics. Core OpenVX 1.2 has significantly expanded functionality, including conditional execution, feature detection, and classification operations.

Khronos announced that the glTF™ 1.0 (GL Transmission Format ) royalty-free specification for transmission and loading of 3D content has been finalized for Ratification and is immediately available for use by tools and application vendors. glTF is an efficient, interoperable asset delivery format that compresses the size of 3D scenes and models, and minimizes runtime processing by applications using WebGL™ and other APIs. glTF also defines a common publishing format for 3D content tools and services.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the Khronos Data Format Specification 1.0. This new standard provides precise mechanisms to generate machine-readable format descriptions of repetitive data, such as pixels, enabling standards and software to cleanly communicate and interoperate. This royalty-free specification will be used across multiple Khronos API initiatives, and is open to be used by third party standards and applications.

The Khronos Group has released revision 30 of the SPIR-V specification. This revision of SPIR-V includes multiple corrections and synchronizes all token spellings to the official headers. These official C/C++ headers are available along with the specification in the registry.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the SPIR 2.0 provisional specification that provides a non-source encoding, and binary level portability, for OpenCL 2.0 device programs. SPIR (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation) is the industry's first open, cross-platform Intermediate Representation standard for portable heterogeneous parallel computing and is based on LLVM IR. SPIR enables developers to avoid exposing sensitive kernel source and enables a diversity of language front-ends to easily target OpenCL platforms and devices in addition to OpenCL C. Visit the SPIR specification in the OpenCL registry.