With the announcement of Android N back a few months ago, Google mentioned that Android would be supporting the new Vulkan graphics API . How does Vulkan perform compared to OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0? This article aims to find out. The Vulkan, OpenGL, & OpenGL ES BOF from SIGGRAPH 2016 has an update on Vulkan.

Khronos has put online a lot of the BOF content from the SIGGRAPH. There a lots of photos here and here, hi-res video from the live stream and all of the slides from the presentations.

The Khronos Group today announced the formation of a Safety Critical Advisory Panel to create guidelines for the design of safety critical graphics, compute and vision processing APIs. The Safety Critical Advisory Panel will be open to both Khronos members and invited experts from the industry. Markets such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous vehicles, robotics and avionics increasingly need advanced acceleration APIs that are designed to provide reliable operation and enable system safety certification. The guidelines will be openly published and adopted as part of Khronos’ proven API design process. Experienced practitioners in the field of safety critical system design are invited to apply for Advisory Panel membership, at no cost, with more details at the Khronos Safety Critical working group page.

New OpenGL 2016 ARB extension (requires NVIDIA GeForce 600 series or newer GPUs) ARB_gl_spirv New EXT extension (requires NVIDIA GeForce 400 series or newer GPUs) EXT_window_rectangles New NVX extension (requires Nvidia GeForce 1000 Series): NVX_blend_equation_advanced_multi_draw_buffers

With Unity 5 it is possible to port your games for the Web without the Unity Web Player. There are a few things you need to know before making your game work with WebGL. This post on Gamasutra will try to steer you in the right direction.

Khronos Group is at SIGGRAPH this week. If you are going be sure to bookmark our SIGGRAPH event page containing our complete list of BOFs and Khronos related sessions. We’ll have free t-shirts, a Chapters BOF on Tuesday, several Khronos Tech BOFs on Wednesday as well as our famous After Party BOF Blitz where you can meet, ask questions and eat with some of the folks behind the Khronos technologies. Our Wednesday line-up includes:

- OpenVX & OpenCL @ 10am

- OpenCL, SYCL, & SPIR-V @ 11:00am

- WebGL & glTF @ 1:00pm

- Vulkan, OpenGL, & OpenGL ES @ 2:30pm

- and the Khronos After Party @ 6:00pm


Starting today at 2pm and running until Wednesday there is a good selection of Khronos related courses, papers and non Khronos BOFs. Be sure to also check out the Khronos member booths including AMD, Google, Intel, KDAB and The QT Company, MAXON, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Unity.

Glare Technologies Indigo 4 renderer in its beta state is using OpenCL to deliver 100% pure GPU rendering. Glare Technologies says this “means very fast rendering on all OpenCL compliant GPUs, including AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPUs.”

Khronos introduces Vulkan Hpp, an open source Vulkan C++ API. Vulkan is a C API and as such inherits all common pitfalls of using a general C programming library. The motivation of a low-level Vulkan C++ API is to avoid these common pitfalls by applying commonly known C++ features while keeping the overall structure of a Vulkan program and preserving the full freedom it provides as low-level graphics API.

The Brenwill Workshop Ltd. will launch MoltenVK, an implementation of Vulkan that runs on iOS and macOS, during the SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim, California, and will discuss and demonstrate MoltenVK at the Khronos Vulkan Birds of a Feather session at SIGGRAPH, on Wednesday, July 27th, 2016. Learn more about MoltenVK.

The Khronos Group today announced significant momentum behind the glTF (GL Transmission Format) royalty-free specification for the transmission and loading of 3D content. Since the launch of glTF 1.0 in September 2015, Khronos has released an open source glTF validator, commenced community review of the glTF 1.0.1 specification that incorporates industry feedback for enhanced interoperability, successfully registered glTF as a MIME type with IANA and has catalyzed a growing array of importers, translators and tools supporting the glTF standard. More information on glTF specifications and activities is available on the Khronos website. Read the press release.

RetroArch 1.3.6 can now run the N64 Vulkan core, paraLLEl. Previous versions of RetroArch will not be able to run this because of the new extensions to libretro Vulkan which we had to push to make this renderer possible. paraLLEl is a standalone libretro core separate from the regular libretro core that it is based on. It includes only a Vulkan rendering backend and a low-level RSP.

The schedules for the all-day Khronos BOF Blitz and famous BOF Blitz After Party are now online. Featuring four BOFs on Wednesday July 27th, and a 5th BOF on Tuesday July 26th for Khronos Chapters. We’ve also compiled a list of all the SIGGRAPH sessions, courses, workshops and BOFs that contain Khronos Technology. Unsurprisingly there is a ton of Vulkan stuff going on this year. Checkout the event page today. Hope to see lots of you in Anaheim during SIGGRAPH!

Khronos has over 130 members who are helping to change the way the world works with information. To increase the diversity of our ranks, we have added a new Associate membership level that makes it easier for companies with fewer than 20 employees to join and contribute to the standards that we promote. Complete details are available on the Khronos website.

The long-awaited Vulkan patch for Doom is now available, allowing the game to be played with either the OpenGL or Vulkan rendering backends. With this release Doom has become the first performance-intensive game released to use Khronos’s new low-level API, and arguably the first game where the rendering path is being implemented for performance reasons rather than proof-of-concept reasons. Read more over on AnandTech.

Over on the Imagination Technologies developer blog, a new tutorial on adding ray tracing to an OpenGL ES based deferred lighting system.