On April 27, 2023 the Vulkan® Ray Tracing TSG released the VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch extension, which exposes the ability to fetch vertex positions from an acceleration structure hit when tracing rays. The SPIR-V SPV_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch and GLSL GL_EXT_ray_tracing_position_fetch extensions have also been released to provide SPIR-V and GLSL support for this functionality.

Today, Khronos® is releasing a new multi-vendor Vulkan® extension that aims to radically simplify how applications specify shaders and shader state while maintaining Vulkan’s ethos of being a highly performant “API without secrets.” This extension is VK_EXT_shader_object. It introduces a new VkShaderEXT object type which represents a single compiled shader stage, along with 4 new functions to manipulate and use VkShaderE

Streamlining the asset creation pipeline for 3D Commerce and beyond! Model & texture. Public Domain or CC0Image: Copyright ©2023, The Khronos Group, Inc CC-BY 4.0 Online retailers and adtech platforms are increasingly enabling 3D interaction on their sites and apps to increase customer engagement. These companies need to ingest 3D product models from a wide variety of sources, including suppliers, brands, and manufacturers, and many have

Background to Compute in Vulkan Graphics processors have come a long way from simple framebuffer-based 2D display cards to fully programmable high performance devices. One of the most groundbreaking changes in this evolution was the addition of freely programmable compute units, paving the way for general-purpose computations on the GPU (aka “GPGPU”) and leveraging graphics processors for a host of use cases that have traditionally be

There are many approaches to creating realistic-looking materials for 3D objects. However, not all of them are suitable for transmission over the Web, and many have a prohibitively steep learning curve. Physically Based Rendering (PBR) has emerged as an artist-friendly, intuitive, expressive, and robust technique for adding materials to 3D objects. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group has embraced this approach, and over the past few years, they have created formal glTF extensions for a variety of PBR materials. glTF’s growing set of PBR material extensions allow artists to create strikingly realistic 3D objects – suitable for cross-platform applications including browsers, mobile devices, native applications and more – that will perform consistently across a wide range of viewers and devices.

In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively called ‘Vulkan Video’, for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. Today, Khronos is releasing finalized extensions that incorporate industry feedback and expose core and decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.

Khronos will release an ongoing series of Vulkan Video extensions to enable additional codecs and accelerated encode as well as decode. This blog is a general overview of the Vulkan Video architecture and also provides details about the finalized extensions and links to important resources to help you create your first Vulkan Video applications.

The recently released VK_EXT_surface_maintenance1 and VK_EXT_swapchain_maintenance1 extensions resolve a number of longstanding issues with Vulkan's WSI extensions.

We’ve just released an extension that I think will completely change how engines approach descriptors going forward. Descriptor sets are now backed by VkBuffer objects where you memcpy in descriptors. Delete VkDescriptorPool and VkDescriptorSet from the API, and have fun!

First introduced in 2014 by the Khronos Group®, SYCL™ is a C++ based heterogeneous parallel programming framework for accelerating high performance computing (HPC), machine learning, embedded computing, and compute-intensive desktop applications on a wide range of processor architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and tensor accelerators. SYCL 2020 launched in February 2021 to bring a new level of expressiveness and simplicity to developers programming heterogeneous parallel processors using modern C++, and further accelerating the deployment of SYCL on multiple platforms, including the use of diverse acceleration API backends in addition to OpenCL™.

Khronos has officially adopted ‘Kamaros’ (pronounced Kam-ă-ross) as the name for the Embedded Camera System API and the associated working group. Jointly promoted by Khronos and the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), the Kamaros™ API Working Group is developing an open, royalty-free standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets. Work on the Kamar

Note: this blog summarizes the September 27, 2022 Webinar “Delivering Interactive Experiences with glTF. Access the full webinar recording here. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is constantly assessing emerging requirements of the glTF ecosystem and asking how the group can make the most impactful progress. Over the past 18 months, one issue has consistently bubbled to the top of these discussions: interactivity. The urgency of developi

OpenCL™ Tooling Task Sub Group (TSG) is actively contributing to the LLVM compiler infrastructure project and is determined to bring first-class support for OpenCL and SPIR-V™ to LLVM. While the latest release of Clang brought the long-awaited support for the OpenCL 3.0 standard, C++ for OpenCL 2021 kernel language, and the SPIR-V generation interface utilizing an external tool llvm-spirv from the SPIRV-LLVM-Translator repository, t

The OpenCL™ 3.0 specification and SDK for heterogeneous parallel computation are regularly updated with bug fixes, improved documentation, and functional enhancements. The OpenCL 3.0.12 maintenance released on 15 September 2022, included significant new functionality.

Introduction With the release of the VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension Vulkan gets an alternative geometry rasterization pipeline. This extension brings cross-vendor mesh shading to Vulkan, with a focus on improving functional compatibility with DirectX 12. Mesh and Task shaders follow the compute programming model and use threads cooperatively to generate meshes within a workgroup. The vertex and index data for these meshes are written similarly to s

Khronos opens Machine Learning Forum for anyone to join. Initiative seeks to enable system developers to deploy ML algorithms and applications efficiently across multiple platforms. The speed of innovation within the machine learning ecosystem is faster than ever before, and shows no signs of slowing with new architectures regularly hitting the headlines. While such innovations are fantastic in driving performance and functionality, the sheer diversity of hardware and software solutions poses a challenge for developers hoping to support the latest advancements, while also reaching the widest audience.