David Kanter at Real World Technologies was written an in-depth introduction to OpenCL. Starting with the general history of OpenCL, David covers the execution and memory model, and finished up with a good recap and glossary. An excellent read for the beginner to intermediate OpenCL developer.

Firefox 7 has just been released. Mozilla has identified and patched several vulnerabilities with regards to WebGL including a critical security vulnerabilities.

When it comes to high-performance computing applications, OpenMP has long been the standard open-source API for the job. However, OpenCL is now emerging as a new challenger in the HPC space. According to Evans’ Data Corp., OpenCL is now the second most popular HPC tool with almost 28% of developers using OpenCL, ahead of Intel’s Threading Building Blocks (Source: AMD slideset). Evans also shows OpenCL adoption has increased since 2009. AMD has decided to step up its game by releasing optimization and development tools that fill in the gaps it sees in the OpenCL ecosystem.

Users of Apples recently released Final Cut Pro X will appreciate the most recent upgrade. FCP now includes OpenCL support for exporting your videos. According to OnlineVideo.net “I tested a few simple test projects, and saw some profound speed increases, particularly with an AVCHD clip with a Gaussian Noise effect applied. Not all producers will see these kind of benefits, but it’s nice to see OpenCL start to pay some real benefits.”

While watching the season premiere of Terra Nova the other night, we were surprised to see a Google Chrome commercial. We were even more surprised to hear Google prominently announce WebGL in the commercial, not once but twice. We hope you will enjoy the commercial as much as we did.

The new Intel® OpenCL SDK 1.5 makes it easy for you to design, build, debug, and profile OpenCL applications running on the CPU device.

Among the new features in this release is a beta OpenCL kernel debugger, a support for OpenCL profiling with Intel® GPA 4.2, seamless utilization of the Intel® AVX instruction set through the Implicit CPU Vectorization Module, and offline compiler support for Linux.

DMP is proud to announce two all new OpenGL ES programming training courses. OpenGL ES programming training I and II will run November 10-11 and November 24 - 25, 2011. Complete details are available online for the Training I and Training II courses in english, and in Japanese.

Smith Micro Software has announced the official release of Poser 9 and Poser Pro 2012. New Features include: Subsurface Scattering; Rendering Performance Improvements; Vertex Weight Map Rigging Support; 64-Bit Application and FireFly Render Engine; Vertex Weight Map Editing Tool Suite; and Updated PoserFusion plugins and COLLADA support.

After the last incredibly successful San Francisco WebGL Developers Meetup, another has been setup for September 29th at 7PM. This month’s San Francisco WebGL Meetup features SRI International’s Kuda, an advanced JavaScript library and World Editor that enables web developers to quickly build interactive 3D web solutions. There is only room for about 30 people, so be sure to get your spot early.

Rightware launched the Basemark™ OS for Android, the latest addition to company’s roster of benchmark products. The graphic tests featured in Basemark OS for Android allow accurate measurement of 2D imaging, image scaling, JPEG, PNG and GIF encoding and decoding, and a compelling 3D test set with fillrate, polycount, lighting, texturing and rendering tests, and a 3D game test based on OpenGL ES.

Intel updated their Sandy Bridge drivers at IDF. Intel has refreshed its generic Sandy Bridge graphics driver to version 15.22.50.2509 for 32-bit Windows Vista and 7 and version 15.22.50.64.2209 for 64-bit Windows Vista and 7. some of the fixes include are WebGL rendering problems in Firefox and Chrome, and various OpenGL enhancements. Details are available on the online Intel PDF.

AMD announced that it has created drivers to enable support for the upcoming Windows 8 operating system on AMD-based tablets, netbooks, PCs and servers. AMD technology offers a compelling platform for the forthcoming Windows 8, with native support for Microsoft DirectX 11, C++ AMP, OpenCL and Accelerated HTML5, as well as planned support of DirectX 11.1 features.

The new AMD FirePro SDI-Link and V7900 SDI Professional Graphics Card address the market for real-time, GPU-accelerated post production and broadcast pipelines requiring Serial Digital Interface (SDI) input and output. AMD FirePro SDI-Link was announced with support from the premier players in the broadcast technology market: AJA, Bluefish444, Blackmagic Design, DELTACAST, DVS and Matrox. “Integrators in the broadcast and real-time video production market can now benefit from the latest advances in GPU acceleration,” said Sandeep Gupte, general manager of professional graphics at AMD. Both cards offer extensive support for OpenCL 1.1 and OpenGL 4.2.

At the International Broadcasting Convention 2011NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA GPUDirect for Video. This technology enables application developers to deliver higher quality, more realistic on-air graphics—or take faster advantage of the parallel processing power of the GPU for image processing. This is done by permitting industry-standard video I/O devices to communicate directly with NVIDIA professional Quadro and Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) at ultra-low latency. Nick Rashby, President, AJA Video Systems says “this will allow developers whose apps support AJA video I/O products to take better advantage of the power of NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs, resulting in low-latency access for both graphics compositing and general purpose processing using CUDA or OpenCL, with all the I/O and performance they depend on from AJA.”

The complete OpenGL BOF video set is now online. Watch Barthold Lichtenbelt from NVIDIA discuss what is new with OpenGL 4, Jon Leech ARB Ecosystem TSG Chair deliver an ecosystem update, Bill Licea-Kane from AMD talk about GLSL tips and tricks and Ian Williams also from NVIDIA discuss Viewperf 12. Slides to go along with the videos are available online.