SmallptGPU is a ray tracing test application written using the AMD OpenCL SDK. The video shows it running on the Radeon 4870, with impressive results, but a FirePro workstation card or the new Radeon 5970 should be at least 4x faster. Also, the OpenCL renderer will automatically take advantage and scale across as many cards as you can install in your system.

ATI has announced the production release of their Stream SDK v2.0. The ATI Stream SDK is a complete development platform which allows you to quickly and easily develop applications accelerated by ATI Stream technology using OpenCL. New features include support for OpenCL™ ICD (Installable Client Driver), support for atomic functions for 32-bit integers and support for OpenCL / OpenGL interoperability.

GPU Caps Viewer 1.8.0 is available for download. This new version adds OpenGL 3 as well as OpenCL support with a new panel and several OpenCL demos. GPU Caps Viewer is a graphics card utility for Windows. It quickly describes the essential capabilities of your graphics card including GPU type, amount of VRAM, GPU temperature, OpenGL, OpenCL and CUDA API support. I also offers OpenGL and OpenCL demos to test the latest features of your video card.

Alexey Shmatok recently gave a presentation at Rosta Company on the possibility of using OpenCL for rapid application development. Alexey has made forecasts on the possibility of using OpenCL concept for self-assembling nano-electronic devices. His slides are available in both Russian and English.

The Khronos Group announced a draft specification for the 3D API called WebGL, on December 10th, 2009. If you want to know what WebGL is all about, how fast it is, which browser offers the best implementation, then look no further than todays post on cnet. “If you want to see the scale of browser makers’ ambition to remake not just the Web but computing itself, look no farther than a new 3D technology called WebGL.” wrote Stephen Shankland from cnet.

Qt Labs Blog is doing a series on Graphics and Performance of Qt. The first of the series is an overview of the whole painter, pixmaps, widgets, graphicsview, backingstore idea. Reasons for using the Khronos family of APIs is included for OpenGL and OpenVG.

Fixstars has announced a beta version of “FOXC” OpenCL Compiler for x86. FOXC will allow software developers to take full advantage of multi-core x86 CPUs to develop OpenCL-based softwares. This is a source-to-source compiler that takes OpenCL code as the input source and the output source file is a readable C code. The “FOXC” Beta version can be downloaded for free from the Fixstars website.

The latest version of the OpenCTM 3D mesh viewer (part of the OpenCTM v1.0.2 SDK) has support for loading, viewing and saving several different file formats (OpenCTM, COLLADA, STL, PLY, OBJ and 3DS), making it a convenient companion tool for 3D graphics developers and artists. The viewer uses OpenGL for its 3D view and GUI, and works under Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc. OpenCTM is a file format, software library and a tool set for compression of triangle meshes. It fits well with the current OpenGL rendering pipeline, with support for custom shader attributes among other things.

NiHiLogic has created an HTML based WebGL cheat sheet and a PDF version.

ALT Software has released optimized OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG 1.1 graphics drivers for Imagination Technologies POWERVR MBX graphics core. The drivers are designed to work on Wind River’s VxWorks and Wind River Linux operating systems.

The Khronos Group announced the unveiling of the WebGL Draft Specification. WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element as Document Object Model interfaces. Khronos has setup a wiki, forums and a public mailing list for greater community involvement.

AMD announced collaborate with SiSoftware to develope one of the first industry benchmark testing suites for OpenCL. To be released by SiSoftware, the OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite is part of SiSoftware Sandra 2010. The benchmark suite includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, mobile devices and networks, and can be used to test OpenCL performance on ATI Stream technology.

DMP is proud to announce two all new OpenGL ES programming training courses. For those who have taken past courses, these are two new courses. OpenGL ES programming training I and II will run January 14-15 and January 21-22 2010. Complete details are available online for the Training I and Training II course in english, or Japanese.

Ben Bergen, evolving applications and architectures team, Los Alamos National Laboratory, commented at SC09 : “Our development experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory with adapting codes to the Roadrunner supercomputing architecture exposed several areas where there were no obvious tools or techniques that would allow us to maintain portability across the variety of platforms that we must routinely support to fulfil the Laboratory’s stewardship mission. Initial proof-of-concept experiments with the OpenCL framework make us optimistic that OpenCL can address many of the challenges that we will be facing as the HPC landscape evolves into the future.”

Nokia has released Version 4.6 of its Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. Key performance improvements include an optimized, re-written Qt GraphicsView rendering algorithm, a new OpenGL paint engine and 2D vector graphic support using OpenVG. Qt 4.6 includes support for the Symbian platform for the first time, and adds Windows 7, Apple Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and the upcoming Maemo 6 to the list of Qt-supported platforms.