Intel is looking to contribute a proper LLVM backend that targets Khronos’ SPIR-V, and is looking for comments/questions/guidance. Read more for Intel’s thoughts on design, implementation, current problems, testing and open questions.

Focused on accelerating the adoption of AR in the enterprise, AREA brings a deep understanding of AR use cases and requirements. Khronos develops open standards, tool chains, and best practices for AR that benefit a wide variety of industries. AREA will actively support Khronos’ consensus-based processes for developing interoperability standards to ease integration of AR-enabling components into powerful products and services. This collaboration offers members of both Khronos and AREA, as well as the enterprise AR community at large, an opportunity to contribute to industry-wide discussions that will positively impact the future of AR-enabled user and customer experiences.

During an AREA-hosted webinar beginning at 11 AM Eastern Wednesday 3rd March 2021, Khronos members will present initiatives on which they are working to reduce barriers to adoption of AR for enterprise and 3D Commerce. To join, please visit: https://www.khronos.org/events/area-webinar-2021.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) are working with Codeplay Software to enhance the LLVM SYCL GPU compiler capabilities for NVIDIA A100 GPUs. The collaboration is designed to help NERSC and ALCF users, along with the HPC community in general, to produce high-performance applications that are portable across compute architectures from multiple vendors.

LunarG released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.170.0. These SDKs include support for Vulkan Synchronization2 and several other new extensions. The prior SDK supported Vulkan API revision 1.2.162. Read on for information about the new extensions.

Valheim’s announcement of Vulkan API support is a really significant step in further optimizing the game for a variety of PCs. The biggest advantage most PC games have over console games is just how customizable they are in terms of performance. While Valheim isn’t a super demanding game, this update will allow players with Vulkan to have an even smoother experience if they so choose.

Android is enabling a host of useful new Vulkan extensions for mobile.These new extensions are set to improve the state of graphics APIs for modern applications, enabling new use cases and changing how developers can design graphics renderers going forward. VK_KHR_buffer_device_address is a monumental extension that adds a unique feature to Vulkan that none of the competing graphics API support. This blog describes the extension in detail and how it is used in mobile.