The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the launch of the OpenGL® 4.6 Adopters Program to enable implementations to become officially conformant to the latest generation OpenGL specification. The significantly enhanced OpenGL 4.6 Conformance Test Suite used in the Adopters Program has been released in open source on GitHub to enable industry participation in testing and ongoing conformance test suite improvements. General information on Khronos Adopters Programs can be found here.

Unreal Engine 4.19 preview has a experimental importer for glTF. This is an open format, that, once final, should work better than FBX, and actually work great with Blender. The Unreal Engine forums mentions that “Right now its much superior to FBX for some simple cases. The cool point about glTF is that the same file holds a full scene, with multiple 3d objects, each of them with animation, and each of them with materials, and each material actually imports as a material graph, and with textures.” Take a look and tell us what you think.

The Khronos Group will be at GDC & VRDC 2018. Be sure to mark us in your calendar for the Khronos Dev Day on March 19th in Moscone, West Hall, Room 3022. This years sessions are now posted and include WebGL, glTF, OpenXR and Vulkan. Be sure to book mark the Khronos GDC event page and checkout some of our other upcoming events and meet ups.

LPGPU2 and Khronos member, Samsung, recently shared seven Vulkan demos. LPGPU2 has added the analysis that they performed on their website.

Codeplay has written up a detailed run through of how they how they ensure C++ fundamental types are translated correctly from SYCL code through to OpenCL, retaining their correct size and signedness.
If you’re an application developer, this will help you learn a little about how SYCL works under the hood. If you’re looking to implement SYCL, this will help you find a way to get the compiler to do your lifting for you.

While current generation Linux games with current Linux GPU drivers using the Vulkan API rather than OpenGL may not be significantly faster with higher-end hardware right, the impact of this newer Khronos graphics API tends to be more profound on lower-end hardware, especially when it comes to lightening the load on the CPU. Following recent Pentium vs. Ryzen 3 Linux gaming tests, Phoronix carried out some fresh benchmarks looking at OpenGL vs. Vulkan on the Ryzen 3 1200 quad-core CPU with NVIDIA and Radeon graphics.

Imagination Technologies announces the PowerVR CLDNN SDK for developing neural network applications on PowerVR GPUs. The neural network SDK makes it easy for developers to create Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) using PowerVR hardware. CLDNN sits on top of OpenCL making use of OpenCL constructs so it can be used alongside other custom OpenCL code. It uses standard OpenCL memory, so it can be used alongside standard OpenGL ES contexts. Learn more about CLDNN and download the SDK today.

The Khronos recently announced SYCL 1.2.1. The SYCL 1.2.1 specification has improved on the existing 1.2 standard by introducing new features which allow for better integration with existing machine learning and OpenCL-based frameworks such as TensorFlow as well as various improvements based on user feedback. This is an exciting piece of news for Codeplay is it enables them to work towards full compliance of SYCL 1.2.1 for ComputeCpp, and their v0.5 release which is now available to download. Read more about how Codeplay is using SYCL 1.2.1 with ComputeCpp v.0.5.0.

This three-day training provides a comprehensive introduction to modern OpenGL development. The course begins with basic concepts and includes all the fundamental topics needed to develop flexible, high performance OpenGL code that can run on the desktop and embedded / mobile devices. Key techniques including lighting, texturing, framebuffer objects and transformations are introduced, in a format suitable for any developer working in C or C++. For more information including how to register, or to discuss other OpenGL and related trainings offered by KDAB, please get in touch via the web page.

Startup Sketchfab is taking one of its biggest steps yet today and launching features so that users can buy and sell 3D objects. The company is supporting the industry standard glTF as its download format, which should make it easy for creators to take the objects purchased from the site and import them into creativity software.

Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos™ Group will be talking at two upcoming shows in California this month. The first is The 8th Intelligent System Summit & TEEC Cup Startup Contest on January 14th. Neil will be giving a keynote on ‘Khronos International Standards in China’. The second is the Khronos Embedded Industry Outreach Event in Taipei. The third event is the 2017 Casual Connect in Anaheim California. Here Neil will be talking about ‘Open Standards for Cross-Platform Gaming, Virtual & Augmented Reality’. Be sure to check out the complete list of upcoming events discussing Khronos Standards.

Recently Khronos posted a guest blog ‘Art Pipeline for glTF’ by Patrick Ryan from Microsoft. This covered getting started with authoring content to glTF. A little more in-depth is a post by Don McCurdy on ‘Creating animated glTF Characters with Mixamo and Blender’. The post walks the reader through their workflow using Blender, Mixamo to rig, animate, and export a character to glTF.

There is a new optimized OpenGL/Graphics Math for C. The original glm library is for C++ only (templates, namespaces, classes…). This new library is targeted to C99 but currently you can use it for C89 safely by language extensions. Almost all functions (inline versions) and parameters are documented inside related headers. Complete documentation is in progress. Feedback is welcome on the Khronos forums.

Archintosh article covering the new Khronos NNEF 1.0 standard: “The Khronos Group is more than just about graphics standards like OpenGL and OpenCL. The consortium group has established Neural Network Exchange Format (NNEF) to help data scientists and engineers easily transfer trained networks.” Khronos recently issued a press release for the release of the NNEF 1.0 Provisional Specification.

Codeplay is pleased to announce it has joined the MISRA working group for C++ to help move the standards forward to support C++ ‘11 and beyond, enabling software developers to build safety critical systems for automotive. “The goal for us is ultimately to have a Safety Critical Heterogeneous C++ language that is compatible with ISO standards and Khronos open standards.” Illya Rudkin from Codeplay is chair of the Khronos Safety Critical Advisory Panel.