The SHIELD Upgrade Experience 7.0 was rolled out on June 27th for all NVIDIA SHIELD TV devices, bringing with it support for Android 8 “Oreo” and Vulkan 1.1. If you don’t receive a push notification, you can manually check for updates under Settings > About > System Updates.

In April, Khronos introduced the Safety Critical Advisory Forum in response to developers’ growing concerns and demands of functional safety standards on hardware and software. The advice and support that the forum provides to Khronos Working Groups directly contributes to the creation of SC APIs. Members and non-members can contribute in the forum, this blog outlines the benefits of participation.

The Khronos Group standards logos are now available for download on Sketchfab. Sketchfab makes it easy for anyone to publish and find 3D content online. Available logos currently include OpenXR, OpenCL, NNEF, OpenVX, SPIR, Vulkan, WebGL, SYCL and glTF. OpenGL has not been overlooked and will be arriving shortly.

LunarG has released new Vulkan SDKs for Windows, Linux, and macOS based on the 1.1.77 header. Changes and additions to Vulkan SDK 1.1.77 include: Linux SDK is now packaged as a tar.gz file instead of a .run file; Many bug fixes, increased validation coverage and accuracy improvements, and feature additions and new extensions for this SDK release: VK_KHR_get_display_properties2 and
VK_KHR_draw_indirect_count.

Be sure to also watch the Khronos workshop from the Embedded Vision summit. Video and Presentation slides are online. For the full version of this video, along with hundreds of others on various embedded vision topics, please visit the Embedded Vision website.

Basemark has launched Basemark GPU, a new graphics performance evaluation tool for systems with Vulkan 1.0, OpenGL 4.5 or OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics APIs. This tool enables the industry to objectively and reliably quantify and compare graphics performance of next-generation mobile, automotive and desktop processors.

The Khronos Group NNEF Working Group Chair Peter McGuinness discusses fragmentation in the Machine Learning field. Machine learning capabilities are being added to everything from social media platforms, IoT devices and cameras to robots and cars. The pace of innovation is leading to fragmentation, and one potential consequence of that fragmentation is a risk of stalling. A universal transfer standard for neural networks will cut down time wasted on transfer and translation and provide a comprehensive, extensible and well-supported solution that all parts of the ecosystem can depend on. The Neural Network Exchange Format is one of two standards currently being developed to satisfy this need. Learn more about NNEF and how it aims to solve this issue.

Be sure to also watch the Khronos workshop from the Embedded Vision summit. Video and Presentation slides are online. For the full version of this video, along with hundreds of others on various embedded vision topics, please visit the Embedded Vision website.

Arm Community blog has a new post on using compute post-processing in Vulkan on Mali. This blog post outlines how you can use two Vulkan queues with different priorities to enable optimal scheduling for compute post-processing workloads.

GL-Z is an OpenGL and Vulkan information utility for Windows, Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi and Tinker Board. GL-Z 0.4.0, based on GeeXLab, has been released with the following new features: OpenGL memory usage for GeForce and Radeon GPUs on Windows and Linux; Vulkan API information for each Vulkan-capable device and more.

LunarG has updated its white paper that describes using spirv-opt to reduce SPIR-V size. New discussions include using spirv-opt to “legalize” SPIR-V when generated from HLSL; SPIR-V integration with the glslang and dxc frontends; description of new size reduction passes available in spirv-opt; and updates to the recommended recipe for those who wish to customize their optimization.

The QtBase dev branch, which will become Qt 5.12, now has experimental Vulkan support, courtesy of MoltenVK and prior work in Qt. When the MoltenVK Vulkan to Metal translation library was open sourced earlier this year, this opened the question of how to make this work with Qt. Check out the Qt blog to learn how support for MoltenVK was accomplished.

The X-Plane cross-platform flight simulator has been depending upon OpenGL for nearly two decades since the program first came into existence, but a port of its rendering engine to use the Vulkan API has been a work-in-progress. It looks like their Vulkan support is getting squared away as the company has tweeted this weekend they will be talking about Vulkan integration this weekend at the Flight Sim Expo in Las Vegas.

Complete video from the Vulkanised 2018 in Cambridge UK is now online. If you were not able to get to the May event, you may now watch the seven Vulkan sessions online.

The Vulkan backend for the PSP emulator (PPSSPP) is now the default where available. The OpenGL backend has been properly multithreaded and now runs faster on dual-core devices.