Khronos royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Machine Learning, and Vision Processing

Vulkanised is delighted to be back in person! The largest event dedicated to 3D developers using the Vulkan API will take place in the beautiful city of Munich in Germany on Feb 7-9, 2023. Vulkanised is a unique technical event that brings the Vulkan developer community together to exchange ideas, solve problems and help steer the future development of the Vulkan API and ecosystem. Over the three days of the event developers will learn from leading Vulkan experts and gain real-world insights into the latest Vulkan developments, extensions, applications, techniques, technologies and tools.

Early bird registration is now open until January 20th. Register now and save!

Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, gave a keynote speech at inVISION on November 29th focusing on vision standards & the new Kamaros embedded camera API standard. The video from the keynote is now available (free registration required).

With RapidCompact’s recent release of version 6, they’ve added impressive new features and several improvements for handling 3D models. Among the changes is support for the glTF iridescence extension. Read their blog for the complete list of changes with this new release.

PoCL 3.1 provides compatibility with the LLVM/Clang 15.0 release, switches to using lowercase device names for the platform setup via the “POCL_DEVICES” environment variable, there has been a major rework to the custom device driver, much improved SPIR-V support, continued work towards implementing a Vulkan driver, and a basic OpenCL cl_khr_command_buffer implementation.

NVIDIA RTX™ IO is a suite of technologies that enables rapid GPU-based asset decompression and loading. NVIDIA’s GDeflate GPU decompression format delivers IO-saturating performance on modern NVMe devices. GDeflate is used in Microsoft’s DirectStorage API, and now NVIDIA is contributing the technology for consideration by the Vulkan working group at Khronos. Two new NVIDIA Vulkan extensions to accelerate RTX IO are were released in the Vulkan 1.3.233 update and are supported in the latest NVIDIA drivers on both Linux and Windows. VK_NV_memory_decompression handles decompressing assets on GPU, and VK_NV_copy_memory_indirect handles copying decompressed data to Vulkan buffers/images.

Two switch emulators have recently added MoltenVK to their back-end for portability and benchmarking:

• Ryujinx Switch Emulator Uses Molten VK to Ship on Mac
  “All in all, we’re pleased with what we’ve managed to accomplish. A barrier that many, including ourselves, originally thought unbreakable has been cracked wide open, and the best part is: this is just the beginning. With not only our own efforts to improve the core emulation, but upcoming updates to Metal 3 and the constantly improving MoltenVK, the experience is only going to get better”
• Dolphin Switch Emulator Native Backend Versus MoltenVK
  “We will be relying on MoltenVK to be the benchmark that we compare our native Metal backend against going forward. And it should perform that role excellently, as it is bringing our well tested Vulkan backend to macOS through a very well supported translation layer from a team that has earned our trust. So, while our new native Metal backend is faster, MoltenVK is here to stay. Together, they will help us deliver the most consistently reliable and performant experience that we can give to our macOS users”