With this release, NVIDIA has added support for Vulkan and Vulkan Ray Tracing in the Shader Profiler. Vulkan GLSL shaders are supported in the same way that was previously possible for D3D12 and DXR HLSL shaders. Users that provide debug information for their shaders can see detailed performance data mapped directly to the GLSL source lines it is associated with. This allows users to pinpoint performance issues caused by stalls in the shader instruction pipeline.
The Guide to Vulkan Synchronization Validation, a LunarG white paper, provides an overview of synchronization and why it is important along with a quick-start guide for new users. The reader will learn about synchronization validation and associated validation messages, how to use synchronization validation, and how to optimize it. Learn more about the whitepaper and why correct synchronization is important in this blog post.
The Khronos ANARI working group is defining an open, royalty-free API standard for cross-vendor access to state-of-the-art rendering engines. ANARI will enable experts in domains such as scientific visualization to leverage the latest rendering techniques without needing to use low-level rendering APIs. Graphics vendors will use the ANARI API to enable visualization engines, libraries, and applications with portable access to a diverse range of rendering technologies, including ray tracing. Recently ANARI Working Group members shared an update on their progress towards an initial specification at a Khronos Webinar. Have a look at this Khronos Blog to watch or listen to the webinar, or see a recap of the discussion and audience questions here.
Laminar Research have now released a huge upgrade to their flight simulator with X-Plane 11.50, which brings in lots of rendering changes and advancements.
They completely rewrote their rendering engine to provide Vulkan (on Windows and Linux systems) and Metal (on Mac). This should provide X-Plane 11 players with smoother frame rates, with far less stuttering and better performance overall. For the Linux version you need at least NVIDIA 440.26 and for AMD they’re supporting the ‘official AMD GPU drivers’ along with amdvlk but they didn’t state any particular version.
The latest update to Blender 2.83 LTS (2.83.6) adds support for SteamVR! Devices like Valve Index and HTC Vive should work within Blender using the latest SteamVR. This is made possible via the multi-platform, OpenXR standard.
Watch Pablo Vazquez from Blender give an update on update 2.83.6 in this video.
Celerity is an open source project which focuses on providing a way of scaling applications to a cluster of accelerators without having to be an expert in distributed memory programming. In fact, the Celerity API does not make it apparent that a program is running on many nodes at all: There is no notion of MPI ranks or process IDs, and partitioning of work and data is taken care of transparently behind the scenes. Celerity is built on top of SYCL: The API makes it the perfect starting point that hits a sweet spot between cost and power as well as ease of use. From that base, we set out to find the minimal set of extensions required to bring the SYCL API to distributed memory clusters - thus making it relatively easy to migrate an existing SYCL application to Celerity.
