Version 0.9.10 of the free open-source, cross-platform 3D application framework PixelLight has been released. We’re using OpenGL as well as GLSL within our main-renderer and OpenGL ES 2.0 for Android. From this release on we officially support 64 bit. New developers joint the team and enabled us to do further bug fixing, stabilisation of the technology and to enhance the CMake based build system to make it easier to build PixelLight from it’s sources.

As Henrik points out in a video soundbyte, making amazing 3D graphics as easy to create as “view source” has got to be good for humanity, right?

Rightware announced the release of Power Board, an online benchmarking database service, and Basemark™ ES 2.0 Taiji Free, a consumer-version of the industry’s standard graphics benchmarking product. Basemark™ ES 2.0 Taiji Free for Android-based smartphones, tablets and other embedded devices can be downloaded from Google’s Android Market and from Rightware’s website.

We’re excited to announce the kick off of our Pokki 1UP $50k HTML5 game development challenge. The first place game developer will take home $30k and win a trip to the Game Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco where we will feature their game! We’ve pulled together a top notch panel of game developer leaders to judge submissions which must be submitted by February 20th, 2012 at 11:59pm (PST). What’s also cool is that we just launched support for WebGL, WebSockets, and the Web Audio API. We’re really excited about cutting edge HTML5 technologies like canvas, CSS3, WebGL and Web Audio. There’s already been some impressive demos with these technologies and we’re looking forward to seeing what the Pokki game developers come up with.

AMD is using the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Companies new 28nm manufacturing process to build the new high-end Radeon HD 7970 GPU. The HD 7970 sports 4.3 billion transistors in a 365mm2 die. The 7970 supports OpenCL and OpenGL 4.2. It is assembled from 32 GCN compute units, which translates to 2,048 stream processors, each based on AMD’s new SIMD-plus-scalar architecture. As well, the 7970 includes 768KB of L2 cache and eight render back-ends, features a 384-bit interface to 3GB GDDR5 memory and a PCIe 3.0 interface. The GPU is capable of peak throughput of 264GB/s.

HT4U staff have benchmarked 55 GPUs using three tests with three applications compatible with OpenCL. Especially interesting are the results with the 3D rendering application LuxRender. The article is written in Portuguese, but the results are easy to understand for all.

Digital Media Professionals announced the establishment of the companies subsidiary – Digital Media Professionals USA Inc. in Campbell, California, USA. DMP also announced the appointment of Petri Talala as vice president and the general manager of the US subsidiary.

MaximumPC has published a brief history and review of OpenCL and WebCL in their January 2012 print magazine. A brief excerpt from the article “Support for OpenCL has been quite strong. AMD is so enamored of OpenCL that it dropped its ATI Stream SDK in favor of a new Accelerated Parallel Processing SDK, which exclusively supports OpenCL. OpenCL has also come to the web. A variant of OpenCL, called WebCL, is in the prototype stage for web browsers, which allows JavaScript to call OpenCL code. This means you may one day run GPU compute code inside your browser.”

The Joint And Object (JOA) Framework is a set of javascript templates and a “class” so that beginners can make use of this technology without having to learn the lower level WebGL stuff. The JOA Framework is a combination of a template, support files, user data file, example files and manual. The template file and support files are all modified or unmodified versions of the files used in the WebGL tutorials on LearningWebGL.

AMD gDEBugger is a real-time OpenCL and OpenGL debugger and memory analyzer integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio. The new v6.1 adds concurrent debugging of multiple kernels, greatly improved overall kernel debugging performance, especially in scenarios where large sections of code are being skipped, and overall application stability improvements both for the client (Visual Studio) and server (debugged application) sides.

AMD APP SDK v2.6 is officially released. Notable features are enhanced performance, multi-GPU support on Linux, inclusion of the Khronos C++ wrapper, use of OpenCL kernels in data-driven applications and a preview of OpenCL 1.2 and the static C++ kernel language.

Nicolas Garcia Belmonte, a developer of PhiloGL, has written a great review of the most recent WebGL Camp #4. If you missed the camp, this is a great way to catch up.

Irrlicht3d is asking rhetorically if WebGL is the future. Of course it is, find out why. The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written and usable in C++ and also available for .NET languages. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.

The Khronos Group has posted several presentation slide sets online from SIGGRAPH Asia 2011. Included are slides sets covering KITE, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenGL SC, OpenVG, OpenMAX, OpenSL ES, StreamInput, WebGL and WebCL.

In this talk form the 2011 LLVM Developers Meeting, Intel presents their OpenCL SDK 1.5 and its core technology the vectorizer compiler.


The video presents an overview of the implicit vectorization module and discusses experience with the LLVM compiler toolkit. The presenter also presents some of the design decisions and plans for future features (future instruction sets, vector select, predicated instructions, etc).