The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the Khronos Data Format Specification 1.0. This new standard provides precise mechanisms to generate machine-readable format descriptions of repetitive data, such as pixels, enabling standards and software to cleanly communicate and interoperate. This royalty-free specification will be used across multiple Khronos API initiatives, and is open to be used by third party standards and applications.

The Khronos Group SIGGRAPH schedule has been posted online. This year Khronos brings four BOFs to the BOF Blitz, a Chapter meetup and a course a party! Khronos is celebrating it’s 15th Anniversary this year, and what a year it’s turning out to be. BOFs include OpenVX & OpenCL, OpenCL, SYCL & SPIR-V, WebGL and glTF and Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES.

The Khronos Group has added another Request For Quote (RFQ). This one is to update the glTF three.js loader on GitHub to reflect the latest versions of the glTF specification and three.js library, and to drive feedback into the final glTF 1.0 specification. Complete details for glTF, OpenGL ES, SPIR-V and OpenVX RFQs available online.

Four years ago we presented a prototype for creating custom 3D paper models using OpenGL. This time we present a new version developed using WebGL. Besides several options to custom the paper model like surface color, edge color and thickness, or images used as stickers, the user can also make new models using a simple revolution surface editor. This prototype still follows a client-server model. The server starts to work when the user requests the PDF file, computing a high quality paper model using OpenGL for multisampling, texture filtering and off-screen rendering.

Renesas Electronics Corporation introduced the ADAS Starter Kit based on Renesas’ high-end R-Car H2 System on Chip (SoC) and developed to help simplify and speed the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) applications. The new ADAS Starter Kit is capable of delivering more than 25,000 DMIPS and provides state-of-the-art 3D graphics capabilities and powerful vision processing cores. The R-Car H2 is powered by the ARM Cortex A-15 quad-core configuration running an additional ARM Cortex A-7 quad-core. It also features the Imagination Technologies PowerVR Series6 G6400 GPU which supports both OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 3.0.

Developers at Canonical working on the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux have publicly confirmed for the first time they’re starting to look at the Vulkan graphics API.

OpenGL ES 3.0 Cookbook by Parminder Singh is a fresh book on real time rendering with OpenGL ES 3.0. This book covers a lot of ground, from basic concepts of modern 3D graphics to advanced, real-time rendering techniques using OpenGL ES 3.0. If you are new to OpenGL ES or have some experience in 3D graphics, then this book will be extremely helpful in raising your level from a novice to professional. All the recipes in this book are implemented using C/C++ language and interfaced with Android and iOS embedded platforms.

AMD announced the new AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU, the first 32GB single-GPU server card for DGEMM heavy double-precision workloads, with support for OpenCL 2.0.

AMD has released the Catalyst 15.7 driver for Linux. Included in the change log AMD has listed Multi-Device support for OpenCL 2.0. Among the resolved issues is a fix for segmentation faults observed while launching some OpenGL games in RHEL7.1.

Seekscale had a chat with Neil Trevett, Khronos Group President, on the future of Vulkan. There is a lot of energy and effort going into defining Vulkan – it is not a normal, multi-year, standardization effort – it will be completed much faster than that…

The Khronos OpenGL ES working group is soliciting quotes for enhancing and expanding the OpenGL ES Conformance Test Suite. OpenGL ES is an industry-leading, royalty-free 3D graphics API. Any company, whether a Khronos member or not, is cordially invited to contact Khronos and provide a quote. Interested parties can access the details of the request on the Khronos website.

The Khronos SPIR-V working group is soliciting quotes for developing SPIR-V tools and tests to support OpenCL and Vulkan. SPIR-V is the industry’s first open, cross-platform intermediate representation for portable heterogeneous parallel computing with native support for graphics and compute constructs. Any company, whether a Khronos member or not, is cordially invited to contact Khronos and provide a quote. Interested parties can access the details of the request on the Khronos website.