The Khronos Group would like to introduce the latest Khronos Portland Chapter to the family. Joshua Young has been running the Portland meet up group for quite awhile now and currently has over 1600 members! If you are in the Portland area and have an interest in OpenXR and Virtual Reality, please take a moment to join the group. Learn more about starting your own Chapter.

The third annual 3D Web Fest showcases top 3D web artworks with live presentations by their artists in a film festival setting. The 3D Web Fest is presented by the art and tech communities to illustrate the 3D capabilities of the web. Experience the most innovative commercial, non-commercial, experimental or game-based projects made with WebGL, WebAudio, Javascript, CSS, HTML5, Three.js, and VR. Rub shoulders with thought leaders, influencers and creators in 3D Web. Admission includes complimentary drinks at pre-event reception. All proceeds benefit non-profit organizationCODAME ART + TECH.

Radeon ProRender is a powerful physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images. Built on efficient, high-performance Radeon Rays technology, Radeon ProRender’s complete, scalable ray tracing engine uses open industry standards to harness GPU and CPU performance for swift, impressive results. One of those open industry standards is OpenCL 1.2. AMD’s requirements state: “Hardware agnostic – if your computer can run OpenCL 1.2, it can run Radeon ProRender.” Download the Windows or Linux version directly or learn more about Radeon Pro.

Neil and Yuval Boger (VRguy) talk about VR/AR standards, overlapping standards organizations and what’s the best way for companies to get involved. There is also a complete transcript of the podcast. In Neil’s own words “...the key thing to realize about the Khronos Group, if people haven’t come across Khronos before, is that it’s an open organization. So, any company is welcome to join.”

Vulkan 1.0.53 does have a number of document clarifications and fixes, but most exciting is a handful of new extensions. The new ones to Vulkan 1.0.53 are VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, VK_EXT_blend_operation_advanced, VK_EXT_sampler_filter_minmax, and VK_NV_framebuffer_mixed_samples. Read more about this update from Phoronix, or hop on over to the Vulkan Change Log for more details on this update.

This post from Don McCurdy will walk through the process of exporting an animated glTF 2.0 model from Maya LT. The workflow includes Maya LT, FBX Converter, Blender and the Blender glTF exporter. Since Blender cannot import recent versions of FBX, the workflow also uses COLLADA as an intermediate format.

Synopsys announced that it has enhanced the convolutional neural network (CNN) engine in its DesignWare EV6x Vision Processors to address the increasing video resolution and frame rate requirements of high-performance embedded vision applications. To simplify software application development, the EV6x processors are supported by a comprehensive suite of tools and software. Combined with software development tools based on OpenVX, OpenCV and OpenCL C embedded vision standards, the MetaWare EV Development Toolkit offers a full suite of tools needed to accelerate embedded software development.

Following on from the renderer refactoring and DirectX 12 implementation, the CryEngine team has been hard at work implementing a Vulkan renderer. The Vulkan Renderer is not functional yet, but is available in Github for feedback.

Apple announced several updates to the Mac lineup earlier this month at WWDC. Geekbench 4, which includes a new GPU Compute Benchmark that measures the performance of GPUs at performing compute tasks, shows that GPU performance with OpenCL has improved considerably with an increase of up to 80% when compared to the equivalent 2015 model. If you’re interested in how your computer compares you can download Geekbench 4. Find the complete benchmark results on the Geekbench website.

The first edition of IWOCL news since IWOCL 2017 in Toronto is now out. Highlights from the newsletter include a special thanks to everyone who participated and helped make the event such a great success, and links to all the slides and presentations made at the event.

Frank Brill, Design Engineering Director at Cadence and Chairperson of the Khronos Group’s OpenVX Working Group, presents the “OpenVX Computer Vision Library Standard for Portable, Efficient Code” tutorial at the May 2017 Embedded Vision Summit.

AMD’s GPUOpen initiative has posted a number of Vulkan open-source projects over time, with their latest open-source project is a Vulkan Memory Allocator. The VulkanMemoryAllocator is designed as a “easy to integrate Vulkan memory allocation library.” Learn more about this project on Phoronix.

Vulkan Multipass was one of the talks at the Khronos Developer Day at GDC’17. The below is a blog summarizing the content of the presentation.

In the previous instalment Qt looked at the background for Qt 5.10’s upcoming Vulkan support. This next instalment starts digging out into the details.

Duskborn Labs has just released part II of their OpenCL to Vulkan porting guide. Part I covers cl_platform_id -> VkInstance, cl_device_id -> VkPhysicalDevice and cl_context -> VkDevice. Part II covers porting from OpenCL’s cl_command_queue to Vulkan’s VkQueue.