Furian is designed to address the increasing compute requirements across multiple applications and market segments with efficient use of compute APIs including OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.0 and OpenVX 1.1*. Furian adds a bi-directional GPU/CPU coherent interface for efficient sharing of data; and a transition to user mode queues from kernel mode queues which reduces latency and CPU utilization for compute operations. Based on a published Khronos specification, GPUs based on the PowerVR Furian architecture are expected to pass the Khronos Conformance Testing Process. Current conformance status can be found at www.khronos.org/conformance.
Nick Whiting is the elected OpenXR Working Group Chair and technical director of AR and VR at Epic Games. “VR and AR have experienced a boom of interest recently, and with that, a flood of hardware and software companies have begun spinning up efforts in the field,” Khronos said in a news release. “While variety is great, the growing number of devices, each with their own incompatible APIs is increasing fragmentation.” The key issue now, Whiting said, is timing. Read the complete interview.
Content made in Unity is supported in Daydream and can even be made in VR. Vulkan has had rudimentary support since December, and this update promises to make it easy to port almost any content to Vulkan to make it run more easily and efficiently, even for users with lesser hardware.
AMD’s deal with Bethesda spans multiple games across a range of series. The crux is primarily to implement Vulkan as well as “the computing and graphics power of AMD Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs.”
NVIDIA has announced the availability of a new Vulkan GeForce and Quadro Graphics driver targeted at both desktop and notebook configurations, namely version 377.01 beta (or 21.21.13.7701), which manages to resolve an issue encountered with SteamVR shaders.
Socionext Inc., a leader in state-of-the art system-on-chip technology, has developed the “SC1810” series, the fourth generation version of its high-performance graphics display controllers. In addition to further strengthening the graphics functions for in-vehicle display system, which the company has proven achievements, Socionext incorporated the industry first hardware accelerator that conforms with Khronos Group’s computer vision API OpenVX to the SC1810. Full press release in PDF can be read here.
GPU Caps Viewer 1.33.0 adds the support of some recent GPUs and fixes a crash in Vulkan demos with recent NVIDIA and AMD graphics drivers. All Vulkan code has been recompiled with latest Vulkan headers (v1.0.42). GPU Caps Viewer is a graphics card information utility focused on the OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL and CUDA API level support of the main graphics card.
zSpace, Inc. announced it is joining The Khronos Group’s OpenXR working group to define a cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard for access to modern virtual reality (VR) devices. Along with other Khronos members, zSpace will help define and support the development of OpenXR, a standard to enable VR applications to easily connect to VR hardware.
The Khronos Group made several major announcements at GDC 2017. Here is a quick review of what’s going on:
- Adoption Grows for Vulkan; New Features Released: Press Release
- OpenXR - Cross-Platform, Portable, Virtual Reality: Homepage - Blog
- Call for Participation in the New 3D Portability Exploratory Group: Homepage
- WebGL 2.0 Specification Finalized and Shipping – Work on Next Generation WebGL Underway!: Blog
- Final Call for Feedback on glTF™ 2.0: Blog
- Request for Quote - Blender glTF Exporter: More information
In addition to the news, Khronos has a booth at GDC with lots of demo’s going on, and will be updating the new @OpenXR and Flickr frequently.
Imagination Technologies latest blog is broken into two parts: The first part discusses issues related to the artist and the production of game scene assets. The second part describes the software engineering project to integrate the Unreal Engine with Imagination’s PowerVR GR6500 Wizard development hardware, and their Vulkan driver with their proposed ray tracing API extensions, in order to demonstrate ray tracing functionality running in a well-known game engine.