Croteam, the studio that brought us the amazing Serious Sam series and The Talon Principle, are closely following the development of Vulkan and are prepared to use it. Given their track record, it’s very likely that Croteam will be one of the first studios to provide Vulkan support in its games.

Khronos member StreamComputing launched an educational initiative that aims to get more developers to study and use OpenCL in their projects. Within this project, up to 20 collaborators will port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible. Vincent Hindriksen and Adel Johar who organized this project looked for a way for the group to educate themselves. One of the ways was to gamify the porting by benchmarking the kernels and defining winners, and another was to optimize kernels within StreamComputing to push the limits. Victor Oliveira, who wrote most of the OpenCL code in GEGL, joined the GEGL-OpenCL project to advise.

In a continuation of NVIDIA’s first Vulkan post, here they go further into details of one of the most common state changes in scene rendering: binding shader resources such as uniform- or storage-buffers, images or samplers.

At CES 2016, Alex Davies from Tom’s Hardware moderated a panel called “What’s Under The Hood” hosted by The Immersive Technology Alliance at VR Fest. After the panel, Alex sat down with Daryl Sartain, Director of Virtual Reality and ITA VR Council Chair at AMD for a one-on-one. Alex and Daryl speak briefly about Vulkan and DX12.

This ‘Trends Session’ will bring executives up to date with developments in the computer processor and software industry that will enable their business applications to run significantly faster. With so many disruptive and revolutionary changes to the processor industry, such as the widespread adoption of heterogeneous parallel processors (GPUs, FPGAs, and Intel Xeon Phis™), you need to become aware of what is already happening and the trends to leverage and plan for. Strategic overviews of what is coming next that you as a senior IT/C-Level executive need to know and how you can leverage it. As more companies see the need for big data and data science,the need for faster speeds and lower energy costs are on the top of mind for CEO’s, CIO’s, CTO’s and all end users of the data analysis - Business Development, Sales, Marketing, Actuaries, Product Development, etc.

Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications 2016 includes all the features for OpenCL development for Android and Windows previously available in Intel INDE OpenCL Code Builder 2015 R2 and all features for Linux development which available in Code Builder for Intel Media Server Studio. There are a lot of other new and updated features listed.

The Khronos Group is in Seattle this month for the winter Face to Face. We’ve posted a couple of photos from the weeks sessions on Flickr. Visit Khronos Group on Flickr to meet the Vulkan team and see who is the recipient is of the Khronie award.

Toon Boom Animation Inc. announced the release of Storyboard Pro 5. This new release streamlines the pre-production and storyboarding process with new creative tools for artists, adds improvements to the 3D workflow, and provides better integration with editorial. Storyboard Pro 5 has also been improved in order to enable pre-production pipelines for CG, live action and games cinematics. Some of the new features include better integration between 2D and 3D with the ability to snap 3D models to surfaces, create layers on models, import COLLADA and Alembic files and work with a more responsive 3D camera.

John Carmack is the new CTO of Oculus VR. He’s still coding in his new position though, and yesterday he posted an interesting tweet about Vulkan, mentioning “impressive improvements” on early Vulkan drivers while running native code. He also added that it will be a “big win” once Vulkan gets proper support from popular engines such as Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4. Last month, Khronos announced that Vulkan 1.0 was almost complete and it would be released in early 2016, with a slight delay over the previous schedule.

This post by Peter Messmer on the NVIDIA Parallel Forall blog provides the basic steps to create a (full) OpenGL context using EGL in a headless environment, with code examples. EGL context creation is particularly relevant for accelerated rendering on HPC systems or in a cloud environment, where context management via X11 is often times impractical. Applications include in situ visualization and CUDA/OpenGL interoperation.

The Fields Institute will host a three day workshop on parallel computing led by expert in the field AJ Guillon. The workshop will provide trainees with a mixture of theory and hands-on experience. Trainees will learn parallel programming with OpenCL, and so will be able to apply their knowledge to CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators such as the Intel Xeon Phi. AJ Guillon is a Khronos member and contributed to OpenCL 2.1 and the OpenCL C++ kernel language as well as being the Khronos Toronto Chapter leader.

Limitless Computing announced SightSpace Pro, a cloud-based and mobile solution that makes it possible to view 3D digital models and designs in the form of real-life buildings using Augmented Reality technology. The new SightSpace Pro works seamlessly with the most popular modeling and design file formats including Autodesk .DWG and .DXF, Trimble SketchUp (.SKP), Collada (.DAE), .DGN, .KMZ, and .KML.

There are two Khronos Chapter Meetups tomorrow. WebGL Baristas, Lesson 1 in Amsterdam, and New Graphics APIs discussion panel at the dawn of Vulkan in Paris. There are two more Chapter meetups scheduled in January for next week.

Valve has made the SDK for its Steam Link streaming device available for download through GitHub. The Linux-based SDK allows for the creation of native Link applications, and even features OpenGL ES 2, Qt 5.4, and SDL 2 support.

The NVIDIA developer blog has a great article highlighting some of the benefits of Vulkan. A short but worthwhile read for any OpenGL and Vulkan enthusiast. “In this post we want to look at the basic operations that normally happen in a rendering frame and which API mechanisms are used.”