Adobe has released Substance 3D Stager, a new application for laying out, lighting and rendering 3D scenes aimed at the emerging ‘virtual photography’ market previously staked out by Adobe Dimension. It includes a number of interesting features, including physics-based layout tools, readymade studio lighting rigs, and a Vulkan-based renderer capable of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The software is available as part of Adobe’s new Substance 3D Collection, alongside Substance 3D Painter, Substance 3D Designer and Substance 3D Sampler: the new name for Substance Alchemist.

NVIDIA DLSS support for Vulkan games is now available on Proton, enabling Linux gamers to use the dedicated AI Tensor Cores of their GeForce RTX GPUs to accelerate frame rates in DOOM Eternal, No Man’s Sky, and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Support for DLSS-enhanced DirectX titles running via Proton layered over Vulkan will arrive this Fall.

In this blog from Arm, Hans-Kristian Arntzen looks at how to implement deferred shading, a style of rendering which is still quite common. The deferred techniques have evolved over time, but the fundamental remains where a G-buffer is rendered, and lighting is computed based on that G-buffer data. This decouples geometry information from shading. Most of the innovation in the last years in the deferred space has revolved around reformulating the lighting pass, but the fundamentals remain the same.

Codeplay has been awarded a contract by Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to implement the oneAPI DPC++ compiler, an implementation of the SYCL open standard, to support AMD GPU-based, high-performance compute (HPC) supercomputers.

War Thunder now uses the OpenXR standard, which provides better image quality, increasing picture sharpness compared to the previous implementation at the same super sampling settings. For example, a picture at 100% SS in SteamVR is comparable in quality with 140% SS in the previous implementation! Implementation of OpenXR allowed the developer to fix a lot of bugs, for example, the incorrect display from the gunner position or blurred object outlines.

In this interview, European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) President, Chris Yates, and Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett discuss the industry’s interest in the creation of open, royalty-free API standards for controlling embedded cameras and sensors.