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NVIDIA presents Vulkan-specific tips that are not necessarily explicitly covered by the other Advanced API Performance posts. In addition to introducing new Vulkan 1.3 core features, this post shares a set of good practices for clearing and presenting surfaces.

AVATAAR is shaping consumers’ online buying/ browsing behavior by creating immersive, interactive shopping experiences and re-imagining the visual discovery journey. It uses a globally first-of-its-kind XR+AR technology platform, taking a deep learning AI-driven approach to scaling commerce. With 10+ US patents and strategic partnership with Facebook and Google, Avataar is deeply committed to re-shaping the digital commerce industry through delivering life-size 3D and XR+AR first experiences across all consumer touchpoints (web, in-app and social channels), using their proprietary platform. Avataar works behind the scenes, powering some of the world’s largest automobile, retail and e-commerce brands across US, Asia and Europe in delivering delightful, new age experiences for end-consumers, and re-imagining business RoI in the course.

The Khronos Group has issued a Request for Proposals for SYCL 2020 CTS. This project will improve the existing SYCL Conformance Test Suite (CTS) targeting the SYCL 2020 standard specification[1] in two ways:

• improved test coverage of SYCL 2020 tests;

• CTS Framework refactoring to reduce development barriers to creating and deploying new tests.

The work described in this RFP covers 6 months of work aiming for breadth-first coverage, with the possibility of extension at the WG’s discretion for further depth coverage

RFP responses are requested by 5p.m. PT on Monday July 25, 2022.

In this article, James Brodman and John Pennycook review five outstanding additions found in SYCL 2020. A key goal of SYCL 2020 is to align SYCL with ISO C++, which has two benefits. First, it ensures that SYCL feels natural to C++ programmers. Second, it allows SYCL to act as a proving ground for multivendor, multiarchitecture solutions to heterogeneous programming that may inform other C++ libraries (and perhaps ISO C++ itself).

Many of the syntactic changes in SYCL 2020 are a result of updating the base language from C++11 to C++17, enabling developers to take advantage of features such as class template argument deduction (CTAD) and deduction guides. But there are many new features, too! In this article, we choose to highlight five features new in SYCL 2020 and talk a little about why they matter.

• Backends open the door for SYCL implementations built on other languages/frameworks besides OpenCL, enabling SYCL to target a wider variety of hardware.

• Unified shared memory (USM) is a pointer-based access model, which serves as an alternative to the buffer/accessor model from SYCL 1.2.1.

• Reductions are a common programming pattern, which SYCL 2020 accelerates via a “built-in” library.

• The group library provides abstractions for cooperative work items, yielding additional application performance and programmer productivity through alignment with underlying hardware capabilities (regardless of vendor).

• Atomic references aligned with the C++20 std::atomic_ref extend the C++ memory model to heterogeneous devices.

Leading standards organizations and companies have united to drive open metaverse interoperability needed to build the open metaverse. The Metaverse Standards Forum will explore where the lack of interoperability is holding back metaverse deployment and how the work of Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) defining and evolving needed standards may be coordinated and accelerated. Open to all at no cost, the Forum will focus on pragmatic, action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards, while also developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines.

The following graphic cards from the Intel® Arc™ line are now fully conformant: A350M, A370M, A550M, A730M, and A770M.