Part of the Khronos Group

The Khronos Group - Media Authoring and Acceleration

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

OpenGL - The Industry Standard for High Performance Graphics

OpenGL® is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API in the industry, bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. It is window-system and operating-system independent as well as network-transparent. OpenGL enables developers of software for PC, workstation, and supercomputing hardware to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics software applications, in markets such as CAD, content creation, energy, entertainment, game development, manufacturing, medical, and virtual reality. OpenGL 3.2 exposes all the features of the latest graphics hardware.

OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems

OpenCL™ is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.

OpenGL ES - The Standard for Embedded 3D Graphics

OpenGL® ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL™ specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics. OpenGL SC is tuned for the safety critical market.

EGL - Native Platform Interface

EGL™ is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs.

COLLADA - Digital Asset and FX Exchange Schema

COLLADA™ defines an XML-based schema to make it easy to transport 3D assets between applications - enabling diverse 3D authoring and content processing tools be combined into a production pipeline. The intermediate language provides comprehensive encoding of visual scenes including: geometry, shaders and effects, physics, animation, kinematics, and even multiple version representations of the same asset.COLLADA FX enables leading 3D authoring tools to work effectively together to create shader and effects applications and assets to be authored and packaged using OpenGL® Shading Language, Cg, CgFX, and DirectX® FX

WebGL - OpenGL ES 2.0 for the Web

WebGL is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that brings OpenGL ES 2.0 to the web as a 3D drawing context within HTML, exposed as low-level Document Object Model interfaces. It uses the OpenGL shading language, GLSL ES, and can be cleanly combined with other web content that is layered on top or underneath the 3D content. It is ideally suited for dynamic 3D web applications in the JavaScript programming language, and will be fully integrated in leading web browsers.

OpenGL SC - Safety Critical Profile

The open standard OpenGL® SC Safety Critical Profile is defined to meet the unique needs of the safety-critical market for avionics, industrial, military, medical and automotive applications including D0178-B certification. It simplifies safety-critical certification, guarantees repeatability, allows compliance with real-time requirements, and facilitates porting of legacy safety-critical applications.

OpenKODE - Khronos Open Development Environment

OpenKODE® is a royalty-free, open standard that combines a set of native APIs to increase source portability for rich media and graphics applications.  OpenKODE reduces mobile platform fragmentation by providing a cross-platform API for accessing operating system resources, and a media architecture for portable access to advanced mixed graphics acceleration.

OpenVG - The Standard for Vector Graphics Acceleration

OpenVG™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG. OpenVG is targeted primarily at handheld devices that require portable acceleration of high-quality vector graphics for compelling user interfaces and text on small screen devices - while enabling hardware acceleration to provide fluidly interactive performance at very low power levels.

OpenMAX - The Standard for Media Library Portability

OpenMAX™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.

OpenSL ES - The Standard for Embedded Audio Acceleration

OpenSL ES™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems. It provides a standardized, high-performance, low-latency method to access audio functionality for developers of native applications on embedded mobile multimedia devices, enabling straightforward cross-platform deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities, reducing implementation effort, and promoting the market for advanced audio.

OpenWF - The Standard for building composited windowing systems

OpenWF™ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides a low-level hardware abstraction interface for composited windowing systems to make use of composition and display hardware. OpenWF is targeted primarily at handheld devices that require portable acceleration of composition whilst minimizing memory bandwidth usage and power levels.

Khronos News

OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Posted on March 12th 2010 • Permalink • Categories: API related OpenCL
Tags: opencl gpu gpgpu cpu hpc

Linux Magazine discusses how OpenCL fits in with todays High Performance Computing (HPC), and why you might want to use it over other APIs.
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Khronos Group Delivers COLLADA Adopters Package & Conformance Tests

Posted on March 11th 2010 • Permalink • Categories: API related Collada General News Developers
Tags: collada conformance adopters

The Khronos Group announced that the COLLADA™ 1.4 Adopters Package is complete and under final review prior to public release--anticipated for April, 2010. The Adopters Package contains both conformance testing software and documentation intended to drive rapid evaluation, deployment and acceptance of the COLLADA specification in 3D content creation, and asset management software. Three new levels of COLLADA compliance are offered in the Adopters Package, which is available to any interested company by executing the Khronos COLLADA 1.4 Adopters Agreement. You can learn more about COLLADA at the Game Developer Conference Friday, March 12 from1:30pm to 2:30pm. The official press release is available here, and an official feedback thread has been started on the COLLADA.org forums.
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Khronos Unleashes Cutting-Edge, Cross-Platform Graphics Acceleration with OpenGL 4.0

Posted on March 11th 2010 • Permalink • Categories: General News Developers
Tags: opencl opengl gpu api gpgpu cpu

The Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL® 4.0 specification. This is a significant update to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API, and includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language allowing developers to access the latest generation of GPU acceleration. OpenGL 4.0 further improves the close interoperability with OpenCL™ for accelerating computationally intensive visual applications. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware.
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Pre-release of the open source project ‘CLyther’

Posted on March 10th 2010 • Permalink • Categories: API related OpenCL
Tags: opencl api developers library python opensource sourceforge implementation

Currently in the planning stages of a new open source project, CLyther, is a Python tool similar to Cython. CLyther is a python language extension that makes writing OpenCL code as easy as Python itself. CLyther currently only supports a subset of the Python language definition but adds many new features to OpenCL. CLyther exposes both the OpenCL C library as well as the OpenCL language to python.
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Autodesk Softimage 2011 3D rendering software support COLLADA import export

Posted on March 10th 2010 • Permalink • Categories: API related Collada
Tags: collada 3d graphics pipeline export import rendering

Autodesk® Softimage® 2011 introduces innovative new rendering and animation tools that help artists create more complex, high quality characters and effects in less time. Included in the new features is Crosswalk 5.0, which will allow you to transfer Softimage content in and out of Autodesk 3ds Max® and Autodesk Maya® software pipelines using the latest dotXSI, COLLADA, and FBX standards.
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