The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the ratification and public release of the OpenXR™ 0.90 provisional specification. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance access to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)— collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. The new specification can be found on the Khronos website and is released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback at the OpenXR forum.
Tobii announced at the 2019 Game Developers Conference, a new software development kit (SDK) for XR applications and new resources for PC developers. The new developer guides and tools ease eye tracking integration in a variety of important ways, from providing new libraries and APIs for intuitive object mapping and selection, to delivering example code and implementation tutorials. The Tobii XR SDK and associated libraries are designed to be used with and complement the capabilities of device-specific SDKs associated with VR headsets that support eye tracking and the OpenXR initiative.
Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) is thte AMD offline compiler and integrated code analysis tool, supporting the high-level shading and kernel languages that are consumed by DirectX 11, Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenCL, including HLSL, GLSL, the OpenCL kernel language, and SPIR-V. Along with support for Vulkan in the RGA GUI, the biggest new feature in RGA 2.1 is a new analysis system that lets you obtain the GCN machine ISA and hardware resource information, using the compiler in the running driver that you have in your system. Learn more on the Radeon GPU Blog from AMD.
NVIDIA VKRay is a set of three extensions that bring ray tracing functionality to the Vulkan. VK_NV_ray_tracing is the stable registered extension for adding ray tracing effects to Vulkan raster applications. Callable shaders provide applications with the means to reuse shading code across many different objects. The new stable extension includes API updates for cleaner code and flexible memory management. Learn more in the NVIDIA Developers News center.
Arm has released "Vulkan Best Practices for Mobile Developers Tutorials" on GitHub. You can read a quick overview of what this new tutorial is all about in the Khronos Blog.
At its GDC 2019 keynote, Google announced Stadia, a cloud streaming service allowing graphically-intensive games to be available to anyone who can run Chrome. Doom Eternal will be one of the first games on the platform, streaming at 4K resolution, 60 fps. Google has partnered with AMD to design a custom GPU with "more than ten teraflops of power," which is paired with a custom CPU for each Stadia rendering instance. Those instances will run on Linux and use the Vulkan API. Google has partnered with Unreal and Unity to "bring full support to the most popular and familiar game engines to our development community."
