Khronos Press Releases

POWERVR SGX first with conformance for all Khronos mobile APIs on production silicon

Imagination Technologies reports that POWERVR SGX is the world’s first 3D graphics acceleration solution to achieve conformance on commercially available production silicon for all of the Khronos™ mobile 2D and 3D graphics APIs which includes OpenGL® ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG™ 1.0.

Press Contact
David Harold
Imagination Technologies
Imagination House
Home Park Estate, Kings Langley, Herts, WD4 8LZ
Tel +44 (0)1923 260 511
Fax +44 (0)1923 270 188
e-mail:

London, UK, August 14th 2008: Imagination Technologies, the leader in mobile graphics technologies, reports that POWERVR SGX is the world’s first 3D graphics acceleration solution to achieve conformance on commercially available production silicon for all of the Khronos™ mobile 2D and 3D graphics APIs – OpenGL® ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG™ 1.0—reinforcing POWERVR’s credentials as the leading mobile and embedded graphics acceleration solution.

APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable software applications to use the power of advanced hardware in a high level, well defined and structured way. Conformance was achieved using Texas Instruments’ POWERVR SGX enabled OMAP3430 application processor.

Production-ready SoCs utilising its industry-leading POWERVR SGX graphics acceleration technology are now designed into more than 20 announced MID, UMPC and other board –level products with many more due within the next six to nine months. The first phones capable of delivering OpenGL ES 2.0 support, enabled by POWERVR, will enter the market in Q4 2008.

Imagination’s POWERVR MBX 3D acceleration core is also conformant with Khronos’ OpenVG 1.0.1 and OpenGL ES 1.1 APIs.

POWERVR SGX is currently available in SoCs from Intel, NEC and Texas Instruments, and several further key industry leaders are also committed to POWERVR SGX based platforms.

Says Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination Technologies: “High performance, fully conformant support for open standards such as the Khronos APIs is a key strength of all of our IP core technologies. The graphics-driven content revolution is being enabled across many markets by the combination of Imagination’s POWERVR hardware and the industry standard Khronos APIs for graphics, which are now available across an ever growing range of operating systems and hardware platforms.”
Says Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group: “We congratulate Imagination on this important trio of conformance achievements – particularly as it is the first organization to achieve certification for OpenGL ES 2.0 based on production silicon. OpenGL ES 2.0 enables fully-programmable 3D graphics on embedded systems. With the support of major suppliers such as Imagination, OpenGL ES 2.0 will usher in a new generation of devices that will enable revolutionary applications, ultimately driving consumer demand.”

Supplementary Information
Imagination’s POWERVR graphics technology, which has been highly optimized for mobile devices, is already deployed in volume SoCs from leading semiconductor manufacturers including Texas Instruments, Renesas, NXP, Freescale, Samsung, SiRF and Intel, with chips from several other manufacturers yet to come.

POWERVR MBX graphics, which supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG, dominates the market today for graphics acceleration shipping in mobile phones, PMPs, PNDs and MIDs.

POWERVR SGX brings a fully unified shader environment to mobiles, while retaining full compatibility with existing POWERVR MBX applications. Shaders are a technique used extensively in games consoles and other high end graphics platforms for creating advanced effects which enable more realistic and compelling images to be created. Unlike traditional 3D rendering, shaders are programmable, enabling the content developers’ creativity to become the defining factor on the appearance of a game, user interface or other application.

The POWERVR SGX architecture is uniquely scalable, with IP (Intellectual Property) cores in the family targeting entry level handsets, through smartphone and MID, up to netbooks and laptops. The small sizes of the IP cores and the uniquely efficient patented tile-based deferred shading architecture allow chip makers to keep the clock-speed of the core low and memory bandwidth the lowest in the industry, extending battery life.

POWERVR SGX’s patented tiled-based deferred rendering and multi-threaded Universal Scalable Shading Engine (USSETM) keep graphics processing on chip and are critical in ensuring that the POWERVR SGX GPU architecture can deliver optimal performance from any given silicon area or memory subsystem while minimising power consumption by eliminating unnecessary processing.

For further information, please see www.imgtec.com/powervr/powervr-graphics.asp .

About Imagination Technologies
Imagination Technologies Group plc (FTSE:IMG) – a leader in semiconductor System on Chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP) – creates and licenses market-leading embedded
graphics, video and display accelerators, multi-threaded processors and multi-standard receiver technologies. These IP solutions are complemented by dynamic and extensive developer and middleware ecosystems. Target markets include digital radio and audio; mobile phone multimedia; personal media players (PMP); in-car navigation and driver information; personal navigation devices (PND); Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) and Mobile Internet Device (MID); digital TV & set-top box; and mobile TV. Its licensees include leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, as well as innovative leading edge start-up and fabless semiconductor companies. Imagination has corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX, OpenSL ES and OpenWF are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Releases OpenGL 3.0 Specifications to Support Latest Generations of Programmable Graphics Hardware

Strong industry support for state-of-the-art OpenGL 3.0 API and GLSL 1.30 shading language specifications on all major platforms; OpenGL evolutionary model to accelerate development of standard; Interoperability with OpenCL being defined

For more information:
Elizabeth Riegel, Managing Director, Khronos Group

From outside US: +1 415 869 8627

11th August, 2008 – SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, CA The Khronos™ Group announced today it has released the OpenGL® 3.0 specification with strong industry support to bring significant new functionality to the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. OpenGL 3.0 includes GLSL™ 1.30, a new version of the OpenGL shading language, and provides comprehensive access to the functionality of the latest generations of programmable graphics hardware. The OpenGL working group has also defined a set of OpenGL 3.0 extensions that expose potential new functionality for the next version of OpenGL that is targeted for release in less than 12 months, and a set of extensions for OpenGL 2.1 to enable much of the new OpenGL functionality on older hardware. Additionally, OpenGL 3.0 introduces an evolutionary model to assist in streamlining the specification and to enable rapid development of the standard to address diverse markets. Finally, the OpenGL working group has announced that it is working closely with the emerging OpenCL standard to create a revolutionary pairing of compute and graphics programming capabilities. The new OpenGL 3.0 specifications are freely available at www.khronos.org/opengl.

The OpenGL 3.0 specification enables developers to leverage state-of-the-art graphics hardware, including many of the graphics accelerators shipped in the last two years both on Windows XP and Windows Vista as well as Mac OS and Linux. According to Dr. Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, a leading graphics market analyst based in California, the installed base of graphics hardware that will support OpenGL 3.0 exceeds 60 million units. AMD, Intel and NVIDIA have made major contributions to the design of OpenGL 3.0 and today all three companies announced their intent to provide full implementations within their product families. Additionally, the OpenGL working group includes the active participation of leading developers such as Blizzard Entertainment and TransGaming that have played a vital role in ensuring that the specification meets the genuine needs of the software community.

“We are very pleased to see the release of OpenGL 3.0, which includes numerous features and extensions that will help us and other ISVs bring amazing gaming content to OpenGL-based platforms,” commented Gavriel State, founder & CTO of TransGaming, Inc.

OpenGL 3.0 introduces dozens of new features including:

Vertex Array Objects to encapsulate vertex array state for easier programming and increased throughput;
non-blocking access to Vertex Buffer Objects with the ability to update and flush a sub-range for enhanced performance;
full framebuffer object functionality including multi-sample buffers, blitting to and from framebuffer objects, rendering to one and two-channel data, and flexible mixing of buffer sizes and formats when rendering to a framebuffer object;
32-bit floating-point textures and render buffers for increased precision and dynamic range in visual and computational operations;
conditional rendering based on occlusion queries for increased performance;
compact half-float vertex and pixel data to save memory and bandwidth;
transform feedback to capture geometry data after vertex transformations into a buffer object to drive additional compute and rendering passes;
four new texture compression schemes for one and two channel textures providing a factor of 2-to-1 storage savings over uncompressed data;
rendering and blending into sRGB framebuffers to enable faithful color reproduction for OpenGL applications without adjusting the monitor's gamma correction;
texture arrays to provide efficient indexed access into a set of textures;
32-bit floating-point depth buffer support.

The new version of the OpenGL Shading Language, GLSL 1.30, provides front-to-back native integer operations including full integer-based texturing, integer input and outputs for vertex and fragment shaders and a full set of integer bitwise operators. It also improves compatibility with OpenGL ES, adds new interpolation modes, includes new forms of explicit control over texturing operations, provides additional built-in functions for manipulating floating-point numbers and introduces switch statements for enhanced flow control within shader programs.

The OpenGL working group has also released a set of extensions to OpenGL 3.0 that can be immediately used by developers and, after industry feedback, will potentially be included in the next generation of OpenGL targeted for release in less than 12 months. These extensions include geometry shaders, further instancing support, and texture buffer objects.

Khronos today also released a number of extensions to OpenGL 2.1 which enables some of the new features in OpenGL 3.0 to be used on older generations of hardware. These extensions include enhanced VBOs, full framebuffer object functionality, half float vertices, compressed textures, vertex array objects and sRGB framebuffers.

Additionally, OpenGL 3.0 defines an evolutionary process for OpenGL that will accelerate market-driven updates to the specification. The new OpenGL API supports the future creation of profiles to enable products to support specific market needs while not burdening every implementation with unnecessary costs. To avoid fragmentation, the core OpenGL specification will contain all defined functionality in an architecturally coherent whole, with profiles tightly specifying segment-relevant subsets. OpenGL 3.0 also introduces a deprecation model to enable the API to be streamlined while providing full visibility to the application developer community, enabling the API to be optimized for current and future 3D graphics architectures.

Finally, the OpenGL working group is working closely with the newly announced OpenCL working group at Khronos to define full interoperability between the two open standards. OpenCL is an emerging royalty-free standard focused on programming the emerging intersection of GPU and multi-core CPU compute through a C-based language forheterogeneous data and task parallel computing. The two APIs together will provide a powerful open standards-based visual computing platform with OpenCL’s general purpose compute capabilities intimately combined with the full power of OpenGL.

“OpenGL 3.0 is a significant evolutionary step that integrates new functionality to ensure that OpenGL is a truly state-of-the-art graphics API while supporting a broad swathe of existing hardware,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL working group at Khronos. “Just as importantly, OpenGL 3.0 sets the stage for a revolution to come – we now have the roadmap machinery and momentum in place to rapidly and reliably develop OpenGL - and are working closely with OpenCL to ensure that OpenGL plays a pivotal role in the ongoing revolution in programmable visual computing.”

More details on OpenGL 3.0 will be discussed at the OpenGL “Birds of a Feather” meeting at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles at 6PM on Wednesday August 13th at the Wilshire Grand Hotel. More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2008_los_angeles_california/.

About OpenGL
The OpenGL specification enables developers to incorporate a broad set of programmable 3D and 2D graphics rendering and visualization functions, and provides unfettered access to graphics hardware acceleration. Since its introduction by SGI in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry’s most widely used and supported programming interface and is available on all major computer platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OS. Controlled by the Khronos Group since 2006, and with broad industry support, OpenGL is a vendor-neutral, multiplatform graphics standard that is uniquely positioned to leverage and drive the continuing evolution of graphics hardware.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Digia joins Khronos Group as a Contributing Member

Digia joins the Khronos Group promoting open standards for hardware accelerated mobile graphics and multimedia. The membership provides access to all Khronos standards including non-public member data and work in progress. Digia also gains the right to participate the standardization work.

Further information:
Director, Special Projects: Tuukka Turunen,
Email:
Tel. +358 40 7655 800

Director, Communications: Jarkko Virtanen,
Email:
Tel. +358 40 7593 603

Digia joins the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member to support the evolution of open standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of UI graphics, games and media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, such as mobile phones. Khronos is an open, member-funded consortium committed to developing royalty-free standards for mobile and embedded markets. Khronos has extensive membership from all aspects of the mobile industry including carriers, handset OEMs, middleware vendors, games developers and semiconductor providers.

“Desire for advanced graphics and seamless mobile multimedia experience has driven wide adoption of enhanced handsets and services, and we are pleased to see Digia join Khronos to contribute to the development of open APIs for the next generation of multimedia devices,” says Matti Paavola, OpenMAX AL Work Group Chair. “Digia will be able to participate in the development of open multimedia standards such as OpenGL ES and OpenMAX, and now they have “members only” access to specifications under development to enable them to get their solutions to market even more rapidly.”

Tuukka Turunen, Director, Special Projects from Digia continues: "We have seen how much hardware accelerated graphics and media improve the user experience in smart mobile devices. Having immediate reaction to user interaction and visually pleasing graphics is becoming the basic requirement in mobile phones. We believe that the best way to realize this is via open standards."

Digia has worked in creating state of the art mobile multimedia solutions for over a decade, and built solutions for several Khronos standards such as OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX and OpenVG. By joining the Khronos Group Digia gains access to numerous standards, non-public material including work in progress, and right to participate standardization committees.

Digia in brief
Digia delivers information and communication technology solutions worldwide. Our strength in smart mobile devices and real-time information systems enable a mobile life. Our clients are entities who want to capitalise on digital information in their business. New technologies well thought usability and modern service channels enable real time access for correct information or services through their computer, a mobile handset or any other digital device.

We are based in the Nordics, operating globally and employing over 1,300 professionals. We are listed on the OMX Nordic Exchange Helsinki (DIG1V).

The Khronos Group in brief
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Releases COLLADA 1.5.0 Specification with New Automation, Kinematics, and Geospatial Functionality

COLLADA expands into new markets and widens adoption among leading content-creation software packages; Support for COLLADA 1.4 continues in parallel with COLLADA 1.5 development

For Information:
Rita Turkowski, Graphics Software Marketing Manager, Intel

Telephone: +1 (408) 765-9269

Elizabeth Riegel, Khronos Group Marketing Director

Toll-free US: +1 888 222 1899
From outside US: +1 415 869 8627

COLLADA expands into new markets and widens adoption among leading content-creation software packages; Support for COLLADA 1.4 continues in parallel with COLLADA 1.5 development

5th August, 2008 – Beaverton, ORThe Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has released the new COLLADA™ 1.5.0 specification, which includes significant new functionality to further broaden the applicability of this leading standard for 3D digital asset exchange. The expanded functionality includes B-reps (boundary representations) and kinematics for CAD, automation, and interactive entertainment applications, and georeferencing of geospatial assets for GIS and mapping software. Following the lead of early adopters like SOFTIMAGE®|XSI®, Google SketchUp, and NVIDIA FX Composer 2, many authoring packages have now added support for importing and exporting COLLADA assets, including Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya®, Crytek CryENGINE® 2, AMD RenderMonkey™, Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 Extended, Harris Inscriber® G7™, and virtual world applications including Vivaty and SceneCaster. Khronos has also released the COLLADA 1.4.1 2nd Edition specification and is planning a Conformance suite for COLLADA 1.4 for release in 2008. The new COLLADA specifications are publicly available at www.khronos.org/collada.

The new B-rep and kinematics functionality in COLLADA 1.5 is unprecedented in a royalty-free standard and enables COLLADA to be adopted by the AutomationML group, a consortium of automotive industry leaders that includes Daimler and ABB, as the intermediate language for CAD automation work flows. COLLADA 1.5 also provides a new OpenGL® ES 2.0 effects profile and enhanced support for external shader effects systems, enabling a wider range of content authoring tools for game developers using frameworks such as Microsoft® XNA™ with DirectX®.

Additionally, for important disciplines such as GIS, COLLADA now supports accurate geo-referencing of geospatially defined assets for those who wish to blend real and virtual 3D assets. With Google's participation in the COLLADA working group, a new file format extension called .zae (Zipped Asset Exchange) has been introduced in COLLADA 1.5. This archive format extension was motivated by Google to include zipped COLLADA models and their assets in the Google 3D Warehouse, often created in their popular SketchUp 3D modeling tool. Says Mark Limber of Google, "as more applications support COLLADA the world of 3D content is becoming more open and accessible, and Google is pleased to support this effort."

Khronos will continue to support COLLADA 1.4 for existing users while developing the COLLADA 1.5 XML schema features for new markets. Consequently, the Khronos Group also today announced the availability of the COLLADA 1.4.1 2nd Edition specification. This updated specification release includes corrections, clarifications, and minor additions to the documentation for the widely used COLLADA 1.4 standard. The updated specification includes enhanced explanations for transparency, animation, lighting, splines, and skinning.

The COLLADA working group is planning a fourth-quarter release of the Conformance Test Suite for COLLADA 1.4 that comprises a complete GUI and scripting framework that integrates testing methodology with authoring tools and rendering applications and contains up to 500 COLLADA-based content test cases.

“As more and more applications support COLLADA, the world of 3D content is becoming more open and accessible,” said Mark Limber, SketchUp product manager at Google. “Google is pleased to participate in and support this important effort.”

“Softimage is dedicated to cutting edge technology that leverages open source standards to bring complete solutions to customer problems,” said Marc Stevens, general manager of Softimage, and vice president of AVID Technology, Inc. “As such, we see COLLADA as a key strategic component of our future. COLLADA is the only true open format that facilitates 3D data interchange. The latest release adds many features, including a referenced texture archive and support for real-time shaders—exemplifying how COLLADA is leading the way in open workflows. Softimage recently implemented a rich content pipeline to the Crytek, CryENGINE®2, based completely on a COLLADA interchange; we’re fully committed to supporting the advancement of the COLLADA standard, which delivers the most productive work-flows for our SOFTIMAGE|XSI customers.”

“COLLADA 1.5 is a very significant release as it contains new functionality that enables completely new industries to use COLLADA – as well as expanding the use of this widely used standard in its traditional content-creation markets,” said Neil Trevett, President of Khronos. “The industry momentum of COLLADA has now reached a critical tipping point – it has become a genuine lingua franca for 3D designers everywhere.”

See COLLADA at SIGGRAPH 2008, Los Angeles

SIGGRAPH 2008 | Thursday, 14 August | 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm | LACC - Room 511A

This year’s COLLADA BOF (Birds of a Feather) offers an exciting array of speakers who will talk about their work in gaming and visualization, demonstrate some cool new content creation tools, and even show COLLADA used for communicating with 3D digital printers for the first time! Expect to hear almost a dozen presenters at the Siggraph COLLADA BOF. Sign up to attend at: http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/siggraph_2008_los_angeles_california/

About COLLADA
COLLADA is an XML-based schema for digital asset exchange that enables the use of diverse digital-content-creation tools to author sophisticated assets for use by 3D applications, including graphics, animation, kinematics, physics, and shader effects. COLLADA represents authored data in multiple forms, enabling the transformation of assets as they journey from content tools that use high-level descriptions to run-time applications that require optimized, platform-specific representations. The COLLADA specification, documentation, and sample code is available at the Khronos.org website at www.khronos.org/collada.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and can accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Launches Heterogeneous Computing Initiative

Call for industry participation to create open, royalty-free standard for programming parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs

Japanese Translation (pdf)

For Information: Elizabeth Riegel, Khronos Group Marketing Director

Toll-free US: +1 888 222 1899
From outside US: +1 415 869 8627

June 16th 2008 – San Francisco, CA – The Khronos™ Group announced today the formation of a new Compute Working Group to create royalty-free, open standards for programming heterogeneous data and task parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs. The creation of this open standard is intended to enable and encourage diverse applications to leverage all available platform compute resources on a wide range of platforms. Initial participants in the working group include 3Dlabs, AMD, Apple, ARM, Codeplay, Ericsson, Freescale, Graphic Remedy, IBM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Nokia, NVIDIA, Motorola, QNX, Qualcomm, Samsung, Seaweed, TI, and Umeå University. Any company is welcome to join the Khronos Group to participate in this and the other Khronos working groups that are creating an ecosystem of open standards for graphics and media authoring and acceleration. For more details please visit www.khronos.org.

The Compute Working Group will follow proven Khronos processes and invite member contributions as a basis for standardization efforts. Apple has proposed the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) specification to enable any application to tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU and CPU resources through an approachable C-based language. A widely available open-standard compute programming specification with high-performance, general computation support and robust numerics will complement existing solutions and further liberate GPU-based compute power from the realm of graphics-only applications and provide a multi-vendor, portable interface for coordinating all the many-core GPUs and multi-core CPUs within a system. Such capability will have broad applicability - including a central role in the Khronos API ecosystem by providing a powerful compute front-end to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, and a platform for accelerating tasks such as physics and image processing / recognition.

“The Compute Working Group potentially will be one of the most significant standardization efforts at Khronos. Highly-accelerated parallel computation across GPUs and CPUs is essential to many emerging rich consumer applications that will transform the computing experience of diverse users,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. “Significantly, this initiative is aimed at both desktop and embedded devices – the day when you will be able to hold a supercomputer in the palm of your hand is perhaps not so far away.”

Representatives from Khronos and the Compute Working Group will be available in person for briefings at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, 11-15th August 2008. Contact Elizabeth Riegel at the contact information above for appointments.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenKODE™, and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

TransGaming Joins Industry Leaders as Khronos Group Member

Software Technology Leader Adds A New Voice To The Creation Of Open Standards For The Authoring And Acceleration Of Dynamic Media

Contacts For TransGaming:
Paul Nowosad
Director of Marketing
TransGaming Inc.
416.979.9900 x323

Jean-Francois (JF) Dube
Investor Relations
TransGaming Inc.
877.848.8790

Contact For Khronos:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 740 649-7755

Toronto, Canada – (Khronos Group March 28, 2008) - TransGaming Inc. (TSX-V: TNG), a leading developer of portability and graphics technologies has become a Khronos™ Group Contributing Member, joining over one hundred industry leading technology companies. TransGaming will participate and vote with all Members in the ongoing development and promotion of open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems to high-performance desktop and workstation systems.

“We are delighted that TransGaming has joined the Khronos Group, bringing valuable software vendor perspective to the desktop OpenGL standards process,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. “The experience and hard work of members like TransGaming enable Khronos to push forward the OpenGL standard to enable even richer 3D applications across a wide variety of platforms.”

TransGaming is a premier entertainment and graphics software provider widely recognized for the Cider and Cedega Portability Engines. All of TransGaming’s portability products rely heavily on OpenGL to provide a robust and high performance standard graphics interface on targeted platforms. The company has substantial experience working with OpenGL and brings extensive technical knowledge of game-engine technology and graphics systems to Khronos and the OpenGL ARB.

“TransGaming has joined the Khronos Group to help advance and influence the OpenGL standard. Through Khronos TransGaming will aid the evolution of OpenGL, which is critical to the success of our gaming and entertainment products. As a contributing member, we will participate in the evolution of these open standard APIs to ensure that all ISVs are able to take full advantage of the capabilities of their hardware, regardless of their platform of choice,” commented Gavriel State, Founder and CTO of TransGaming.

TransGaming is ‘Broadening the Playing Field’ for consumer technologies, and working with Khronos will ensure development standards continue to enable products that meet or exceed consumer demands.

About TransGaming, Inc.
TransGaming Inc. (TSX-V: TNG), is a leader in the development of unique software portability products that facilitate the deployment of games across multiple platforms. TransGaming’s portability technologies significantly reduce the time-to-market for and costs associated with multi-platform game releases. TransGaming works with many of the industry’s leading developers and publishers to enable their games on the Mac and Linux operating systems, and currently markets its products under four brand names: Cider (Mac), Cedega (Linux), SwiftShader (Graphics), and GameTreeOnline.com (Retail). TransGaming is headquartered in Toronto, Canada and maintains a research and development center in Ottawa, Canada. To learn more about TransGaming’s products visit http://www.transgaming.com.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos Releases OpenKODE 1.0 Royalty-Free Standard for Mobile Rich-Media and Graphics Application Portability

The Khronos™ Group publicly released the final OpenKODE™ 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform open standard that bundles a set of native APIs to provide increased source portability for rich media and graphics applications. Khronos also released a full conformance test suite for OpenKODE 1.0 to enable conformant implementations to use the OpenKODE trademark.

News Release
For Further Information:
Khronos Group Marketing Director
Elizabeth Riegel
+1 (415) 869-8627

Khronos Releases OpenKODE 1.0 Royalty-Free Standard for Mobile Rich-Media and Graphics Application Portability

Multiple conformant implementations shipping; Free development SDKs available; Support from Operators and Handset OEMs; Open source OpenKODE Project announced

February 11th 2008- Mobile World Congress - Barcelona, Spain – The Khronos™ Group announced today that it has publicly released the final OpenKODE™ 1.0 specification, a royalty-free, cross-platform open standard that bundles a set of native APIs to provide increased source portability for rich media and graphics applications. Khronos is also releasing a full conformance test suite for OpenKODE 1.0 to enable conformant implementations to use the OpenKODE trademark. Multiple Khronos members are demonstrating fully conformant OpenKODE implementations at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and are offering free development SDKs. Khronos has also announced a supportive collaboration with the FreeKODE Project to create an open source version of OpenKODE. An OpenKODE whitepaper and the OpenKODE 1.0 specification is available for download at www.khronos.org/openkode/. The specification may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers.

Mobile developers routinely need to maintain hundreds of source versions for every application to handle functional differences between handsets, resulting in significantly increased porting and testing costs, and slowing innovation. Additionally, the interaction between multiple graphics and media APIs is typically not defined, hindering the development of innovative mixed-media user interfaces and applications. The bundle of native, royalty-free APIs in OpenKODE 1.0 helps solve these problems.

“The usability of the Apple iPhone has already had a major impact on the mobile industry, and now consumers demand compelling and highly functional user interfaces and applications which, in turn demand highly-integrated graphics acceleration architectures,” said analyst Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research. “Khronos is to be applauded for creating an open standard that not only tackles the problem of mobile platform fragmentation head on, but also delivers an open architecture that can provide a low-level media processing foundation for a wide range of software platforms such as Windows Mobile, Brew, Symbian UIQ, S60, Limo, Google Android and WIPI – all of which need to deliver stunning rich media in the palm of your hand.”

The new OpenKODE Core API is a small and light abstraction layer that will be familiar to POSIX and C programmers for accessing operating system resources while minimizing source changes when porting applications between Linux, Rex/Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms. OpenKODE Core provides advanced functionality, such as multi-threading under an event-driven architecture; while being carefully designed to provide real-world portability to a wide variety of mobile platforms. An OpenKODE Core library is typically under 100KB in size.

“OpenKODE will play a key role in the development of rich media applications and services in the Korean market, as this new standard is extremely complementary to WIPI-GIGA and other software platforms,” said Hoo-Jong Kim, Head of Mobile Device Development Team, SK Telecom. “As an operator and Khronos Board member, we strongly welcome the reduction in platform fragmentation and the increase in rich media acceleration that the OpenKODE standard provides.”

OpenKODE 1.0 also defines a state-of-the-art media-stack architecture by bringing together the Khronos OpenGL® ES and OpenVG™ media APIs through EGL 1.3 plus a set of EGL extensions for acceleration of mixed 3D and vector 2D graphics. OpenKODE will use upcoming versions of EGL to integrate synchronization and data processing of streaming media using the OpenSL ES™ and OpenMAX™ media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio functionality that is fully integrated with graphics processing; for accelerating a wide variety of software including 3D user interfaces and games, Flash and SVG players, TV and video applications and media players. Through the relevant JSRs, OpenKODE can also provide acceleration for Java as well as native applications.

“OpenKODE Core has been designed by a group of companies within the Khronos Group that have the in-depth experience to provide state-of-the-art functionality in a way that is genuinely portable over a wide range of mobile platforms. OpenKODE will protect developers from having to gain that same encyclopedic knowledge the hard way,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, chairman of the OpenKODE working group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is using the OpenKODE standard to deliver the full power and flexibility of our new generation of application processors. We are showing a fully conformant OpenKODE, including fully accelerated OpenGL ES and OpenVG seamlessly integrated through EGL, here in Barcelona on the new NVIDIA APX 2500.”

All APIs included in a conformant OpenKODE implementation must pass the individual conformance tests defined for that API – including OpenKODE Core. In addition, OpenKODE defines a set of trans-API conformance tests to ensure that the media APIs and EGL correctly provide the specified mixed media functionality - an important factor in genuinely reducing platform fragmentation for application developers. The OpenKODE conformance test suite has been created by Futuremark Corporation under contract to Khronos and is available through the Khronos Group OpenKODE Adopters program – more details here www.khronos.org/adopters/.

“OpenKODE is a significant advance for the handheld industry as it combines the Khronos industry-leading media APIs into a reliable set of functionality that can provide great native performance on mobile devices while reducing fragmentation from the software developers’ point of view,” said Tero Sarkkinen, CEO of Futuremark. “Futuremark has been delighted to play a key role in the industry roll-out of OpenKODE and to apply our considerable expertise in performance measurement software development and functionality testing to create the OpenKODE conformance tests.”

In a separate announcement today, Antix Labs announced an agreement with Motorola for its Game Player client for Motorola UIQ devices implementing the OpenKODE 1.0 specification.

“The fragmented, device-specific nature of native multimedia content has been destroying the mobile industry’s economics; OpenKODE takes major steps to reduce that fragmentation and encourages publishers and developers to improve and deploy more attractive services,” said Tim Renouf, OpenKODE specification editor and systems architect at Antix Labs. “The Antix Game Player, Antix’s cross-platform, binary portable, native solution for mobile gaming, supporting the OpenKODE specification, is being demonstrated at both Mobile World Congress and Game Developer Conference.”

Today Acrodea has announced it is releasing development versions of OpenKODE 1.0 for Windows and Mac OS X which are freely available for developers. The implementations are available at
http://www.acrodea.co.jp/en/openkode. Acrodea has also announced it is porting OpenKODE to the Brew platform.

“OpenKODE is a long-awaited solution that genuinely helps resolve problems such as platform fragmentation and media API interoperability among mobile platforms. Acrodea has actively participated in the OpenKODE standardization work from the very beginning and is extremely pleased with the specification being now ratified and by being able to deliver one of the first, fully-conforming OpenKODE implementations to the market. By maximizing the usage of Khronos APIs, such as OpenKODE and OpenGL ES, Acrodea believes it can minimize time-to-market of its product portfolio and enable more sophisticated user experiences on all major mobile platforms,” said Yoshi Kuniyoshi, CTO and executive vice president of Acrodea.

OpenKODE will be a fertile foundation for innovative and differentiated solutions that go beyond the specification itself – such as middleware platforms that enable the distribution of a single binary across multiple handsets.

“Ideaworks3D has enormous experience in using smart technology to solve mobile fragmentation problems. We’ve offered Khronos strong support through the evolution of OpenKODE 1.0, and have been intimately involved in the design of the OpenKODE Core API. At Mobile World Congress this year we are proudly presenting Airplay 3.5, a single-binary native execution environment which is declared to be conformant with OpenKODE 1.0 on a huge number of platforms,” said Alex Caccia, CEO Ideaworks3D Ltd.

An independent initiative to implement a full open-source version of OpenKODE – FreeKODE - is underway on SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/projects/freekode/. Khronos supports and encourages open source projects based on its API specifications – including providing access to its conformance tests to enable conformant open source implementations.

“We see OpenKODE as an effort to close a critical gap in the consolidation of cross-platform native multimedia development. FreeKODE aims to provide free OpenKODE implementations for a variety of platforms with the help of the open-source community. Using FreeKODE, developers will soon be able to design and build native multimedia applications on the PC, taking advantage of mature development tools, while at the same time target all available OpenKODE compatible platforms,” said Diogo Teixeira, project manager for the FreeKODE Project.

“Some of the recent device launches have heightened consumer expectations for user experience, design, and advanced applications. By helping to reduce porting costs and enabling standardized access to a rich set of media and graphics APIs, OpenKODE provides developers the ability to bring these services and user experience much faster to the user,” says Ryu Koriyama, CEO of Aplix Corporation. “Aplix is pleased to see the public release of the OpenKODE 1.0 specification. Aplix has been an active participant and contributor to the specification from a very early stage and we plan to integrate OpenKODE support into our product portfolio including the industry leading JBlend product which has been deployed in more than 397 million handsets.”

“As an active working group member, we are very excited to be a part of the announcement of the long-needed OpenKODE 1.0 specification. We believe this innovative work will open the door wide for us to innovate next-generation applications and services for diverse mobile platforms with dramatically reduced porting costs,” said Hirotaka Suzuki, CTO of HI Corporation.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, glFX™, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenWF™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenWF, glFX, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES 1.0 Specifications for Embedded Media and Audio Processing

The Khronos™ Group has publicly released provisional versions of the OpenMAX™ AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES™ 1.0 specifications to enable widespread developer feedback and rapid industry implementation of these new standards that are designed to bring portable, state-of-the-art audio, video and image acceleration to mobile handsets and embedded devices. Both specifications are expected to be finalized by mid-2008.

News Release
For Further Information:
Neil Trevett
Khronos President
+1 (408) 464-7053  ntrevett@nvidia.com

Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES 1.0 Specifications for Embedded Media and Audio Processing

Two royalty-free API standards bring advanced, holistically-designed video, audio and image acceleration to diverse operating systems and embedded devices; Provisional specifications encourage developer feedback while maximizing industry momentum.

2nd October, 2007 – ARM Developers’ Conference – Santa Clara, CA – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that it has publicly released provisional versions of the OpenMAX™ AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES™ 1.0 specifications to enable widespread developer feedback and rapid industry implementation of these important new standards that are designed to bring portable, state-of-the-art audio, video and image acceleration to mobile handsets and embedded devices. Numerous Khronos members have participated in the creation of these standards including AMD, Beatnik, Broadcom, Coding Technologies, Creative, Ericsson, Freescale, Nokia, NVIDIA, QSound Labs, Symbian, STMicroelectronics, Samsung, Sky Mobile Media, Sonaptic and Texas Instruments and multiple implementations are underway with both APIs expected to be implemented in commercial devices in 2008. The specifications are available for download at http://www.khronos.org/opensles/ and http://www.khronos.org/openmaxal/ and may be used royalty-free by implementers and developers.

Khronos expects both specifications to be finalized by mid-2008 after integration of industry feedback and completion of conformance tests to enable conformant implementations to use Khronos trademarks. Feedback and comments from the mobile and embedded industries are encouraged on the Khronos technical message boards at http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/ or directly by email to opensl_es_feedback@khronos.org and openmax_al_feedback@khronos.org.

OpenSL ES and OpenMAX AL were designed in close conjunction such that the two APIs expose common functionality, e.g. basic audio playback, in a consistent way - enabling applications to easily use whichever API is available. OpenSL ES is compatible with, and can provide acceleration for higher-level audio standards, including Java API JSR-234 (Advanced Multimedia Supplements).

OpenSL ES – Enhanced Audio for Mobile Games, Music and Phone OpenSL ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform open standard for advanced audio processing on embedded and mobile devices to enable highly portable applications that integrate audio functionality including UI sounds, music playback, ring-tones and full 3D games. OpenSL ES simplifies the development of sophisticated audio-enabled applications with a comprehensive feature-set including sampled audio, SP-MIDI, Mobile XMF, metadata extraction, and equalization, as well as more advanced functionality such as MIDI messaging, 3D positional audio, reverberation and virtualization. OpenSL ES enables application portability by providing a consistent interface to a wide variety of audio architectures on multiple operating systems, and defines phone, music and game profiles to enable diverse devices to implement relevant audio functionality, while minimizing functional fragmentation.

OpenMAX AL - High-Level Streaming Media Acceleration OpenMAX AL is a royalty-free, cross platform open standard for accelerating the capture and presentation of audio, video and images in multimedia applications on embedded and mobile devices. OpenMAX AL includes the ability to create and control player and recorder objects and to connect them to configurable inputs and output objects including content readers/writers, audio inputs/outputs, display windows, cameras, analog radios, LEDs, and vibra devices. In addition, OpenMAX AL supports extensive controls for various digital camera settings and RDS/RBDS functionality for analog radio. OpenMAX AL is the highest tier of the OpenMAX family of multimedia interfaces and provides simplified, operating system-agnostic, programmer-friendly interfaces to developers for accelerating the majority of streaming media applications. While OpenMAX AL is an independent, stand-alone API standard, it has also been designed to be efficiently implemented over the lower-level OpenMAX IL API that provides configurability of multimedia chains and is intended primarily for use by system integrators.

Member Quotes
“The OpenSL ES specification represents the collaborative effort of key industry representatives to create a significant new audio standard,” said Dr Nathan Charles, chair of the OpenSL ES working group and software architect at Creative Labs. “Creative initiated the creation of the OpenSL ES working group within Khronos and remains committed to the widespread adoption of OpenSL ES.”

“The Khronos APIs and technologies will be a key factor driving the next-generation of rich media experiences on mobile devices,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, senior director for software development at AMD. “AMD is continuing to demonstrate its commitment to enabling open standards by chairing the OpenMAX IL and OpenVG working groups, being a co-lead spec editor on OpenMAX AL and supporting these standards in future Imageon multimedia processors.”

“Beatnik is already supplying OpenMAX IL compliant implementations of our industry standard mobileBAE software audio engine to mobile handset and platform providers,” said Russell Tillit, Beatnik’s vice president of engineering. “By delivering technology that fully meets the demands of the OpenSL ES framework we are enabling handset manufacturers to reduce integration time as they bring to market products incorporating advanced audio capabilities and services across a range of hardware, software and operating system platforms.”

“As one of the promoters of the Khronos group, Ericsson believes that OpenSL ES and OpenMAX AL will reach the same level of industry adoption as the previously released Khronos specifications,” said Björn Ekelund, vice president product management, Ericsson Mobile Platforms. “Both operators and handset manufacturers will benefit from these new standards, since they will widen the market for developers of creative applications as well as serving as consistent interfaces in Ericsson’s product line of cost-efficient multimedia-rich mobile platforms.”

“NVIDIA is delighted to see the release of the OpenSL ES and OpenMAX AL specifications as they complete Khronos’ family of embedded acceleration APIs to enable rich mixed-media applications,” said Neil Trevett, vice president mobile content at NVIDIA and president of the Khronos Group. “NVIDIA has chaired the OpenMAX AL working group and will be strongly supporting these open standards on our range of mobile application processors.”

“At QSound, we are firm believers in the benefits of making open, royalty free API’s available to content developers and accordingly, are happy to have participated in the creation of these new standards,” stated David Gallagher, President and CEO of QSound Labs. “QSound will be supporting these standards in its mobile audio solution, microQ.”

SoftBank Mobile Joins the Khronos Group

SoftBank Mobile enabled to influence and promote open media standards for mobile devices - including OpenKODE adopted as part of SoftBank Mobile’s new POP-i platform.

Japanese Translation (pdf)

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 (888) 222-1899
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Group Japanese Business Manager
Hitoshi Kasai
+81(422) 47-5319
khronos@miacis.com

SoftBank Mobile Joins the Khronos Group

SoftBank Mobile enabled to influence and promote open media standards for mobile devices - including OpenKODE adopted as part of SoftBank Mobile’s new POP-i platform

7th August, 2007 – SIGGRAPH - San Diego, CA – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that SoftBank Mobile Corporation of Japan has joined the Khronos Group as a Contributing member. In May 2007 SoftBank Mobile announced their adoption of Khronos’ OpenKODE standard for advanced graphics and media processing in its new Portable Open Platform Initiative (POP-i) platform for mobile phones. Now, as a member of Khronos, SoftBank Mobile will be able to contribute to and vote on the development of OpenKODE and any other Khronos specifications as they are being created and evolved.

“We have been impressed by the Khronos Group’s proven ability to define advanced standards for mobile media acceleration, deliver them quickly to meet emerging market needs – and to prevent fragmentation within its standards to provide a stable programming environment,” said Hiroshi Ohta, executive vice president, product and service development, SoftBank Mobile. “We have confidence that Khronos will continue to provide the foundation specifications for advanced media acceleration that will enable us to create a thriving developer community for the POP-i platform - and we are pleased to announce that we are joining Khronos to support and encourage its ongoing activities and the OpenKODE standard.”

“We are delighted that SoftBank Mobile has decided to join the Khronos Group to provide their support and insights into the evolution of OpenKODE and other Khronos standards,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “A deep understanding of operator requirements is vital to ensure that our specifications continue to meet real-world market needs. Khronos is working hard to be an effective forum for the silicon, handset, software and operator communities to come together effectively to create open standards that generate market opportunities for the entire mobile industry.”

SIGGRAPH Course “3D Ecosystem” Tuesday 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM – Conference room 4
Khronos Handheld API BOFs: Tuesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos “Kodebusters” Party: Tuesday 6:00 PM-8:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos Japanese BOF: Wednesday 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM – Conference room 2
COLLADA Toolchain BOF: Wednesday 2:00 PM - 3:45 PM - Conference room 2
COLLADA Demo Party: Wednesday 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM - Conference room 2
OpenGL BOF: Wednesday 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM – Conference room 2
OpenGL Party: Wednesday 7:15 PM – 8:30 PM – Conference room 2

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/san_diego_siggraph_2007/

About the POP-I Platform
The POP-i platform will enable native applications to access the full power of the OpenKODE media stack architecture which enables 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video and audio to be accelerated and flexibly combined to unlock the full potential of rich media silicon. The use of OpenKODE will encourage and protect the investment of software developers in the POP-i platform by ensuring application portability across multiple handsets – both now and into the future as new handsets are introduced.

About OpenKODE
OpenKODE is a royalty-free, cross-platform standard that combines a set of native APIs into a comprehensive media stack specification for accelerating rich media and graphics applications. OpenKODE aims to make advanced media capabilities consistently available across multiple devices for increased native source portability and reduced mobile platform fragmentation. OpenKODE 1.0 brings together the OpenGL® ES and OpenVG™ Khronos media APIs to provide state-of-the-art acceleration for vector 2D and 3D graphics and provides the new OpenKODE Core API that abstracts operating system resources to minimize source changes when porting games and applications between Linux, Brew, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WIPI and RTOS-based platforms. Subsequent versions of OpenKODE will add the OpenSL ES™ and OpenMAX™ media APIs to provide accelerated video and audio that is fully integrated with graphics processing. More information in OpenKODE can be found at www.khronos.org/openkode/.

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. Web3D and X3D are trademarks of the Web3D Consortium. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.

COLLADA 3D Asset Intermediate Standard Accelerates Adoption and is to be Extended for 2D Vector Graphics

Many leading authoring packages add support for COLLADA; Specification to be extended to add support for vector graphics assets such as fonts; Documentation update released; Conformance Tests nearing fourth quarter release; COLLADA Contest Details Announced

Japanese Translation (pdf)

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 (888) 222-1899
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

COLLADA 3D Asset Intermediate Standard Accelerates Adoption and is to be Extended for 2D Vector Graphics

7th August, 2007 – SIGGRAPH - San Diego, CA – The Khronos™ Group is pleased to announce that industry momentum of the COLLADA™ standard for 3D asset interchange format continues to grow rapidly with significant standardization activity and widening industry adoption. Many authoring packages have now added support for importing and exporting COLLADA assets including: Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, Agency9 MADLIX, Anark Core Platform, Caligari trueSpace 7.5, DAZ Productions DAZ|Studio 1.7, E Frontier Poser 7, Google Sketchup 6, NVIDIA FX Composer 2, Omegame Menus Master, Remograph Remo3D 1.3.1, Terathon C4 Game Engine and Wordweaver DX Studio 2.0.4. In addition the Khronos COLLADA working group has initiated extending COLLADA to include 2D vector graphics assets, such as high quality fonts, enabling authoring of user interfaces and scenes that seamlessly mix 2D and 3D assets in a unified geometry and effects environment.

“COLLADA answers a tremendous industry need,” said Stephen Collins, CEO of Anark Corporation. “The challenge of maintaining an industry-wide standard is enormous in light of the growing number of users and the complexity of the data they are exchanging. At Anark we have experienced this problem first hand as our clients struggle to exchange mission critical product design data and other 3D graphics assets. We developed the Anark Core platform to enhance design, collaboration and communication applications, and we chose COLLADA as a key ingredient in our product strategy. This provides our customers with a dependable exchange format that they can count on.”

“COLLADA has been instrumental in making FX Composer 2 the power house shader tool it is today. By enabling a tight coupling of 3D scenes, materials and shader effects, graphics developers and technical artists can create complex surface and full-scene renderings that can be interchanged with game engines and other digital content creation applications,” said Sebastien Domine, director of developer technology tools at NVIDIA.

2D Vector Graphics Assets in COLLADA
The COLLADA UI initiative within the COLLADA working group is extending the COLLADA standard to support high-quality, Bezier-based vector graphics, such as fonts, on an equal basis to 3D geometry. This will enable the seamless authoring of scenes and user interfaces that mix 2D and 3D assets with all the power of the COLLADA format, including animation, skinning, inverse kinematics and programmable shaders. Khronos invites any company interested in this initiative to consider joining Khronos to participate in this and any other Khronos working group.

“Omegame has joined Khronos to help bring enhanced 2D vector assets to COLLADA, leveraging more than ten years of UI design experience,” said Nicolas Perret, associate managing director and Technical Director of Omegame. “COLLADA UI will create the foundation for authoring mixed 2D and 3D assets in flexible and powerful ways that have not been possible before. For example, being able to import a high quality font and use it with advanced geometry and shader effects will open up many new application and user interface opportunities.”

COLLADA Conformance Tests and Documentation
The COLLADA working group is planning a fourth quarter release of the Conformance Test Suite for COLLADA 1.4.1. The COLLADA Conformance Test Suite is a complete GUI and scripting framework that integrates testing methodology with authoring tools and rendering applications and contains up to 500 COLLADA BASIC test cases.

At Siggraph, the Khronos Group also announced the availability of the updated Release Notes Revision B for COLLADA 1.4.1. The new release notes include highlighted corrections and additions to the current release note for COLLADA. The topics covered include transparency, animation, lighting, splines, and skinning.

“As COLLADA continues to evolve and include more features such as physics and complex shading effects, it is critical that applications keep up and be tested accordingly,” says Christian Laforte, President of Feeling Software. “For that reason,” he adds, “Feeling Software has collaborated with Khronos to develop the COLLADA Conformance Test Suite. The CTS will ensure that COLLADA-compliant tools are tested rigorously and objectively. Already, more than 300 test scenes have been developed and verified across popular COLLADA-compatible tools like ColladaMaya, ColladaMax and the Feeling Viewer.

COLLADA Contest
Khronos today also announced details of the COLLADA Contest that will enable and encourage open source COLLADA conditioning programs to be written to interface with the COLLADA Refinery and uploaded onto Sourceforge. The contest is intended to encourage a growing body of open source conditioners to enable any developer to construct sophisticated processing pipelines to condition content for diverse platforms. The COLLADA working group will select outstanding uploads to be awarded prizes on a regular basis. Further details are at http://www.ColladaContest.com.

See COLLADA at SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego; August 7-9 2007
Developers and members of the press are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #227 to see COLLADA demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend COLLADA events:

COLLADA BOF & Party:- August 8th; 2:00-4:45PM Room 2
COLLADA Crawl Contest: August 7-9; SIGGRAPH Show floor

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/san_diego_siggraph_2007/

About COLLADA
COLLADA is an XML-based asset interchange format that enables the use of diverse digital content creation tools to author sophisticated assets for use by 3D applications, including animation, shaders and physics effects. COLLADA represents authored data in multiple forms, enabling the transformation of assets as they journey from content tools that use high-level descriptions to run-time applications that require optimized, platform-specific representations. The COLLADA specification, documentation, and sample code is available on the Khronos.org website at http://www.khronos.org/collada

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at http://www.khronos.org.

Khronos Group Gains Diverse New Members and Broadens Standards-based Ecosystem

A rich variety of companies join Khronos to drive opportunities for accelerated graphics and media in worldwide markets; Standards-based ecosystem strengthened by member companies providing consultancy services around Khronos APIs. Anark, Antix, ArcSoft, GraphTech, Mentor Graphics, SoftBank Mobile, SRS Labs and Wind River have joined the existing Khronos membership to help define open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems such as mobile phones to high-performance desktop and workstation systems.

Japanese Translation (pdf)

News Release
For Further Information:
Elizabeth Riegel
Khronos Group Public Relations
+1 (888) 222-1899
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Group Gains Diverse New Members and Broadens Standards-based Ecosystem

7th August, 2007 – SIGGRAPH - San Diego, CA – The Khronos™ Group is delighted to announce that Anark, Antix, ArcSoft, GraphTech, Mentor Graphics, SoftBank Mobile and SRS Labs have joined the existing Khronos membership to help define open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems such as mobile phones to high-performance desktop and workstation systems. All Khronos members are able to join any working group to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications and conformance tests - further details are at http://www.khronos.org/members/. Additionally, member-company Ardites announced a consultancy service offered to any company interested to accelerate the development of products using mobile Khronos APIs.

“At SIGGRAPH 2007, Ardites Ltd announced a software consultancy and service model to support hardware vendors, device manufacturers and application developers to effectively utilize the Khronos APIs. With profound experience in key technologies and mobile multimedia ecosystem challenges, Ardites is capable of reducing the time-to-market, support multiple operating systems and improve the performance and security of the end product. By providing training, designing, integration, implementation and testing services, Ardites complements and strengthens the Khronos ecosystem,” said Jarkko Kemppainen, business and competence unit manager at Ardites.

“Khronos is a forum for industry-leading companies to cooperate and create open standards that drive commercial opportunities for our members and the wider industry, and we welcome our new members that bring expertise and key market insights to help ensure Khronos standards continue to evolve to meet market needs,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “Our new members include mobile carriers and vendors for 3D authoring tools, mobile middleware and operating systems from all around the world; illustrating how rich-media authoring and acceleration is becoming vital to multiple industries. Also, an increasing number of member companies such as Ardites and Futuremark are offering consultancy, development and benchmarking services for Khronos APIs – all very vital in encouraging a broad range of products to rapidly and effectively use Khronos open standards.”
“OpenKODE has been developed to provide an essential consistency of service across an increasingly diverse range of mobile and other connected digital devices. We look forward to our highly experienced team at Antix taking an active part in the further development of this important standard,” said Tim Renouf of Antix Labs and the specification editor for OpenKODE.

“We have seen tremendous growth of Multimedia applications on the mobile handset in the past few years. With the introduction of standards like OpenMAX and OpenKODE and their gradual adoption by mobile chip and hardware companies, software companies are liberated to focus energy on product innovation and creativity rather than on lengthy integration with different multimedia hardware,” said David Cao, ArcSoft Vice President of Mobile Business. “The work of the Khronos Group helps to streamline mobile phone development so that different well-segmented software expert companies can work seamlessly together and time-to-market can be significantly reduced. We look forward to seeing an industry-wise adoption of these standards.”

“Khronos is elevating the bar in how standards are defined and created by taking into consideration the entire developer ecosystem,” said Peter Ostrin, CEO, GraphTech Computer Systems. “They’re enabling innovation through the economic support that comes from being able to deploy new technologies across the widest range of platforms, and we are excited to join the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member.”

“We have been impressed by the Khronos Group’s proven ability to define advanced standards for mobile media acceleration, deliver them quickly to meet emerging market needs – and to prevent fragmentation within its standards to provide a stable programming environment,” said Hiroshi Ohta, executive vice president, product and service development, SoftBank Mobile. “We have confidence that Khronos will continue to provide the foundation specifications for advanced media acceleration that will enable us to create a thriving developer community for the POP-i platform - and we are pleased to announce that we are joining Khronos to support and encourage its ongoing activities and the OpenKODE standard.”

See Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego; August 7-9 2007
Any members of the press and industry are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #227 to see demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend these Khronos events:
 SIGGRAPH Course “3D Ecosystem” Tuesday 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM – Conference room 4
Khronos Handheld API BOFs: Tuesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos “Kodebusters” Party: Tuesday 6:00 PM-8:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos Japanese BOF: Wednesday 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM – Conference room 2
COLLADA Toolchain BOF: Wednesday 2:00 PM - 3:45 PM - Conference room 2
COLLADA Demo Party: Wednesday 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM - Conference room 2
OpenGL BOF: Wednesday 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM – Conference room 2
OpenGL Party: Wednesday 7:15 PM – 8:30 PM – Conference room 2

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/san_diego_siggraph_2007/

About ArcSoft
ArcSoft, Inc., founded in 1994 and headquartered in Fremont, California, is an industry leading software developer of multimedia technologies and applications across desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms. ArcSoft offers a full line of high-performance imaging, audio, and video solutions within an extremely small footprint, bringing an exhilarating rich media user experience to mobile phones. ArcSoft mobile multimedia solutions are developed to support the Khronos Group’s OpenMAX standards. For further details, please visit our corporate Web site: http://www.arcsoft.com.

About Ardites
Ardites is a consultancy company focused towards mobile software development. Ardites is a privately owned company, based in Finland and among the fastest growing companies in its industry sector. Ardites was established in 2002 and joined with the Khronos consortium in 2007. Ardites is offering services to all levels of mobile software development, such as IP providers, Operating system providers, OEMs and operators. Ardites’ portfolio, consists of, training, design, implementation and testing services. Web site: http://www.ardites.com.

SOFTBANK MOBILE Adopts OpenKODE to Provide Rich Media Acceleration in its New Handset Platform

SOFTBANK MOBILE Corporation has adopted the OpenKODE standard for advanced graphics and media processing in its new Portable Open Platform Initiative (POP-i) platform for mobile phones that was also announced today. The POP-i platform will enable native applications to access the full power of the OpenKODE media stack architecture which enables 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video and audio to be accelerated and flexibly combined to unlock the full potential of rich media silicon. The use of OpenKODE will encourage and protect the investment of software developers in the POP-i platform by ensuring application portability across multiple handsets – both now and into the future as new handsets are introduced.

Japanese Translation (pdf)

News Release
For Further Information:
Khronos Group Executive Director
Elizabeth Riegel
+1 (888) 222-1899
elizabeth@goldstandardgroup.com

Khronos Group Japanese Business Manager
Hitoshi Kasai
+81(422) 47-5319
khronos@miacis.com

SOFTBANK MOBILE Adopts OpenKODE to Provide Rich Media Acceleration in its New Handset Platform

New POP-i platform provides native application access to OpenKODE APIs

22nd May, 2007 - Clearlake, CA - The Khronos™ Group announced today that SOFTBANK MOBILE Corporation has adopted the OpenKODE standard for advanced graphics and media processing in its new Portable Open Platform Initiative (POP-i) platform for mobile phones that was also announced today. The POP-i platform will enable native applications to access the full power of the OpenKODE media stack architecture which enables 2D graphics, 3D graphics, video and audio to be accelerated and flexibly combined to unlock the full potential of rich media silicon. The use of OpenKODE will encourage and protect the investment of software developers in the POP-i platform by ensuring application portability across multiple handsets - both now and into the future as new handsets are introduced.

“As the open and royalty-free industry standard API, OpenKODE is expected to drive the growth of active community of application and middleware developers for the common platform under development for mobile phones,” said Hiroshi Ohta, executive vice president & general manager of Product & Service Development, SOFTBANK MOBILE. “Because of its comprehensive scope of multi-media sources, including 2D/3D graphics, audio and video, OpenKODE can help us setting a stage for innovative, rich content offerings that can fit a new era of mobile multimedia.”

“The Khronos Group is delighted that SoftBank Mobile has selected the OpenKODE standard to provide the advanced graphics and media capability in the POP-i platform,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “We expect that many operating systems and handset software platforms will adopt OpenKODE to provide state-of-the-art media and graphics acceleration, significantly reducing industry fragmentation and enabling a new class of native applications to innovatively mix multiple media types to create compelling user experiences.R

The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

Open Standards for media authoring and acceleration on desktop, mobile and embedded devices

Khronos Press Releases

POWERVR SGX first with conformance for all Khronos mobile APIs on production silicon

Khronos Releases OpenGL 3.0 Specifications to Support Latest Generations of Programmable Graphics Hardware

Digia joins Khronos Group as a Contributing Member

Khronos Releases COLLADA 1.5.0 Specification with New Automation, Kinematics, and Geospatial Functionality

Khronos Launches Heterogeneous Computing Initiative

TransGaming Joins Industry Leaders as Khronos Group Member

Khronos Releases OpenKODE 1.0 Royalty-Free Standard for Mobile Rich-Media and Graphics Application Portability

Khronos Releases OpenKODE 1.0 Royalty-Free Standard for Mobile Rich-Media and Graphics Application Portability

Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES 1.0 Specifications for Embedded Media and Audio Processing

Khronos Group Releases OpenMAX AL 1.0 and OpenSL ES 1.0 Specifications for Embedded Media and Audio Processing

SoftBank Mobile Joins the Khronos Group

SoftBank Mobile Joins the Khronos Group

COLLADA 3D Asset Intermediate Standard Accelerates Adoption and is to be Extended for 2D Vector Graphics

COLLADA 3D Asset Intermediate Standard Accelerates Adoption and is to be Extended for 2D Vector Graphics

Khronos Group Gains Diverse New Members and Broadens Standards-based Ecosystem

Khronos Group Gains Diverse New Members and Broadens Standards-based Ecosystem

SOFTBANK MOBILE Adopts OpenKODE to Provide Rich Media Acceleration in its New Handset Platform

SOFTBANK MOBILE Adopts OpenKODE to Provide Rich Media Acceleration in its New Handset Platform