Feral Interactive posted on their Facebook page “We’re crazy excited to announce that Mad Max is getting revved to utilise Vulkan, the Khronos Group’s next-generation graphics API.” Instructions on how to sign up for the beta are online. Phoronix has posted a short benchmark comparing Mad Max on OpenGL and Vulkan.

The Khronos Milano Chapter is thrilled to renew the collaboration with Autodesk for the upcoming Design Week in Milan, Italy - April 4-9. The Milano Chapter will be presenting a series of talks on the “Future of Making Things.” Showing how companies are adopting 3D open standards as WebGL and glTF to deliver new solutions for the world of interior design, architecture and manufacturing.

Silicon Valley Virtual Reality 2017 (SVVR) will be host to an OpenXR Panel discussions. Kaye Mason, senior software engineer with Khronos member Google will moderate this fifty minute panel on Thursday March 30th.

Registration to IWOCL is now open. The 5th International Workshop on OpenCL will take place in Toronto, Canada on May 16-18, 2017. Act quickly to get Early Bird pricing, available until April 14th.

Khronos member Sensics has written a short piece on Virtual Reality (VR) standards: “Too early or long overdue?”. Discussing existing and new standards, OSVR and OpenXR.

Google’s Chrome / Chromium web-browser has added a native glTF 1.0 parser. There are glTF utility libraries in JavaScript and other web-focused languages, but Google adding a native glTF 1.0 parser appears to be related to their VR push with supporting VR content on the web.

GPU Caps Viewer 1.34.0 adds the support of the latest GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Radeon RX 580, RX 570 and RX 560 (based on Polaris 10/11 GPUs) as well as Radeon Pro WX 7100, WX 5100 and WX 4100. New Vulkan and OpenGL demos (based on GeeXLab engine) have been added in the 3D demos panel. GPU Caps Viewer is a graphics card information utility focused on the OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL and CUDA API level support of the main (primary) graphics card. Complete changelog is online.

Anvil is a cross-platform, open-source, MIT-licensed wrapper library for Vulkan, developed by AMD engineers. It has been designed with the goal of reducing the amount of time that developers need to spend in order to write a working Vulkan application from scratch. Learn more about Anvil or download the source code from Github.

If you missed todays Vulkan Loader Deep Dive webinar, no worries. Khronos has upload the complete webinar and slide deck.

Khronos Group member Futuremark has added Vulkan support to their 3DMark API Overhead feature test. You can now compare the API performance of Vulkan, DirectX 12, and DirectX 11 with one easy-to-use test.

Mozilla has submitted a proposal to the Khronos Group’s WebGL Next Github proposal repository. From the README, “[Obsidian] is a low-level API that provides maximum feature set of the GPU to the web applications. The API is designed for WebAssembly, modern GPUs, and multi-threaded environment in mind.” Read the complete proposal.

At GDC 2017, in San Francisco during February, Khronos™ released several new Vulkan® extensions for cross-platform Virtual Reality rendering and multiple GPU access. This functionality has been initially released as KHX extensions to enable feedback from the developer community before being incorporated into final specifications. One key question that we have been asked since GDC is whether the Vulkan multi-GPU functionality is specifically tied to ship only on Windows 10.

KDevelop, a cross-platform IDE for C, C++, Python, JavaScript and PHP, is now offering OpenCL language support. KDevelop 5.1 and on has been able to parse code written in OpenCL the Clang-based language support backend.

Cloud Imperium Games developer Ali Brown indicated that Star Citizen will be dropping DirectX support in favor of Vulkan. Specifically, Brown mentioned that CIG had been developing on DX11, with an intent to support DX12. However, because Vulkan enables single-API support for older version of Windows (and Linux) without sacrificing performance and features, the plan now is to move away from DirectX completely.

For The Khronos Group and its members, GDC was filled with lots of new contacts, enthusiasm and inspiration for our flagship standards and excitement over the new API initiatives. We want to thank all of our members, partners, developers, and friends for your participation and feedback at GDC. The latest blog entry is a quick recap from our presence and a sneak peek into what’s next for The Khronos Group.