News Archives

With the release of virglrenderer 0.8.0, getting accelerated OpenGL within a virtual machine (VM) made a big leap forward. One specific aim was to support hosts that support only OpenGL ES to a point that within the VM guest also OpenGL 4.3 applications can be run. An aim that was fully achieved as we can now run games like Alien Isolation within qemu on certain devices that support only OpenGL ES 3.2 and a number of extension.

The FFmpeg library up to this point has supported AMD's Advanced Media Framework (AMF) library just on Windows for H.264/HEVC encoding on GPUs. The Windows code-path makes use of DirectX while now AMD AMF support for Linux via Vulkan is now exposed by the latest FFmpeg code. 

While VKD3D continues to be under heavy development, Valve already appears pleased with it enough that it's now being built as part of their Wine-based Proton software for powering Steam Play on Linux.  Learn more about Proton shipping VKD3D on Phoronix.

Profiling is an important activity when optimizing any application, it can help to pinpoint where the most time is being spent and identify where improvements can be made that will have the biggest impact on performance. This article will provide guidance on how to profile SYCL applications using both ComputeCpp Community Edition and ComputeCpp Professsional Edition.

Kathleen Maher from Graphic Speak interviewed Neil Trevett of Khronos about the difference between Open Standards and Open Source; how Khronos has perfected an efficient way of developing APIs and useful tools relatively fast; and Khronos’ new 3D Commerce Working Group.

Last month at the glTF Ecosystem Forum at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, there were 77 attendees from the games, retail, geospatial, automotive, AEC and VFX domains – and the input and guidance we received will help us set the course for glTF for the next 12 months. This GitHub issue is to share our key takeaways with the entire community.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Associate Member Cappasity. Cappasity lets companies create & deliver 3D/VR/AR experiences to blur the line between online and in-store shopping. It is the first scalable and easy-to-adopt solution for complex eCommerce projects that only takes 3 minutes/SKU to create a 3D and embed it into a store.

bgfx popular open source cross-platform rendering library adds Vulkan renderer backend. Vulkan renderer backend will be bgfx’ default renderer on Linux, and it can be used on all supported platforms including MacOS via MoltenVK emulation.

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Associate Member migenius. The migenius mission is to bring technology into the market place that enables live 3D for all. By applying extensive experience on large scale commercial projects and the convergence of several key technologies, migenius makes high quality, 3D information, in the form of photorealistic imagery, available to the widest possible audience, with no need for expensive workstation computers or complex software. All that is required is an Internet connection and a web browser.

Another blog explaining Vulkan synchronization has just been posted by @Themaister. Synchronization in Vulkan is a large hurdle to overcome when learning the API, and rather than mechanically explaining how it works, the goal in this blog is to instil a mental model in the reader. Despite its reputation for maddening complexity, it is actually understandable and quite logical once you get over the initial hurdles.

The Khronos Group announces a significant expansion in the ecosystem for the NNEF (Neural Network Exchange Format) open, royalty-free standard that enables hardware manufacturers to reliably exchange trained neural networks between training frameworks and inference engines. New and improved NNEF open source convertors, including for TensorFlow Lite and ONNX, enables NNEF to be used to carry trained frameworks from a wider range of training frameworks. A set of extensions to the NNEF 1.0 specification enables NNEF files to contain richer networks of operations and topologies. Finally, an openly available NNEF Model Zoo enables inferencing engines to test their reliable import of NNEF models. More information on NNEF can be found at the Home Page.

​The Khronos Group had several session on BOF Day at SIGGRAPH 2019. Most of the slides and video are now online:

• glTF: Efficient 3D Models: Video | Slides
  
• WebGL: Latest Techniques: Video | Slides
  
• Standardizing All the Realities: A Look at OpenXR: Video | Slides
  
• Vulkan Sessions: Video | Slides
  
• 3D Commerce: Video | Slides
  

Be sure to visit the event page for a detailed list of links to all the presentations and videos.

Vulkan 1.1.119 was released right after 1.1.118. In total, three new extensions have been added: VK_AMD_shader_core_properties2, VK_AMD_pipeline_compiler_control and VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties. The first two are AMD vendor extensions, while the most recent extension was worked on jointly by engineers from Intel, Valve, Google, NVIDIA, AMD, Arm, and Samsung. See the Change log on GitHub for additional the details.

The latest version of the Oculus Unreal Engine Integration adds support for Vulkan on Oculus Quest and Oculus Go. Unity told us they will add the same “later this year.”

The Khronos Group would like to welcome Associate Member TurboSquid. TurboSquid is the world's source for professional 3D models. TurboSquid models are used by game developers, news agencies, architects, visual effects studios, advertisers, and creative professionals around the world. Our goal is to save artists the time of making a great model, and instead let them add their own personality to their creations.