The Khronos Group made several major announcements at GDC 2017. Here is a quick review of what's going on:
- Adoption Grows for Vulkan; New Features Released: Press Release
- OpenXR - Cross-Platform, Portable, Virtual Reality: Homepage - Blog
- Call for Participation in the New 3D Portability Exploratory Group: Homepage
- WebGL 2.0 Specification Finalized and Shipping – Work on Next Generation WebGL Underway!: Blog
- Final Call for Feedback on glTF™ 2.0: Blog
- Request for Quote - Blender glTF Exporter: More information
In addition to the news, Khronos has a booth at GDC with lots of demo's going on, and will be updating the new @OpenXR and Flickr frequently.
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Last week was GDC, and a ton of new tech, as well as new VR games and apps were announced and broadcast out to millions. But one of the most important stories out of GDC was also one of the least flashy. It was a gathering held by a nonprofit known as The Khronos Group, and it dealt directly with how much new VR hardware and software is being released, and how it is rapidly becoming more and more difficult for developers to keep up. Say Hello to OpenXR. Read More
Khronos Chapters are very busy this month with a total of six meetups around the world. Meetups are taking place this March in Milano, Oslo, Cluj Romania, London, Prague and Boston. Check out the details of each meetup and join one for an educational and fun look at Khronos Technology. No Chapter near you? Find out how you can start your own Chapter. Read More
Phoronix had a call with The Khronos Group president Neil Trevett to discuss some of their latest initiatives and the ongoing advancements to the Vulkan API, WebGL, SPIR-V, and more. Read about some of the highlights. Read More
Furian is designed to address the increasing compute requirements across multiple applications and market segments with efficient use of compute APIs including OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.0 and OpenVX 1.1*. Furian adds a bi-directional GPU/CPU coherent interface for efficient sharing of data; and a transition to user mode queues from kernel mode queues which reduces latency and CPU utilization for compute operations. Based on a published Khronos specification, GPUs based on the PowerVR Furian architecture are expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Testing Process. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance. Read More
Nick Whiting is the elected OpenXR Working Group Chair and technical director of AR and VR at Epic Games. “VR and AR have experienced a boom of interest recently, and with that, a flood of hardware and software companies have begun spinning up efforts in the field,” Khronos said in a news release. “While variety is great, the growing number of devices, each with their own incompatible APIs is increasing fragmentation.” The key issue now, Whiting said, is timing. Read the complete interview.
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Content made in Unity is supported in Daydream and can even be made in VR. Vulkan has had rudimentary support since December, and this update promises to make it easy to port almost any content to Vulkan to make it run more easily and efficiently, even for users with lesser hardware. Read More
AMD’s deal with Bethesda spans multiple games across a range of series. The crux is primarily to implement Vulkan as well as “the computing and graphics power of AMD Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs.” Read More
