Khronos member Peter McGuinness has written an overview about NNEF over on the GFXSpeak blog. The new standard was released in provisional form in December of 2017 and, after a period of consultation with industry, is now ratified in its final form and available for immediate use. As well as the standard itself, Khronos is simultaneously releasing a suite of open source tools to allow developers to immediately begin using the format with the three most popular training frameworks: Tensorflow and Caffe/Caffe2. All of these tools are available on GitHub in the Khronos repo. Learn more about NNEF.

The first GPUs from the Turing architecture have arrived with lots of new features. Extensions have been added to both Vulkan and OpenGL to give developers access to these new features. The various Khronos Registries and Repositories have been updated to include the specifications and tools for the new extensions. The Vulkan and OpenGL extensions are enumerated on the NVIDIA website to provide developers access to these new features.

OpenVINO is a comprehensive toolkit for developing applications and solutions that emulate human vision. Based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the toolkit extends CV workloads across Intel hardware, maximizing performance. OpenVINO enables CNN-based deep learning inference on the edge; supports heterogeneous execution across computer vision accelerators—CPU, GPU, Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick, and FPGA—using a common API; and includes optimized calls for OpenCV and OpenVX.

Khronos has released a provisional Vulkan Memory Model Specification that includes extensions for Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL and gives Vulkan developers additional control over how their shaders synchronize access to should cooperate safely over memory operations in a parallel execution environment. In tandem with the extension specification, Khronos has released memory model extension conformance tests to enable implementers to do early tests on their shader compilers to ensure that the specified memory synchronization is implemented correctly. The memory model will have an Alloy description of the extension functionality to enable formal modeling and experimentation.

Forsaken Remastered was just updated with Vulkan support! If you’re on Linux, you’re probably hitting 60fps with the existing OpenGL renderer, but it’s good to be future proof. If you’re on a Mac, though, you definitely want to switch. On my MacBook, the framerate goes from around 15 to a solid 60! On macOS, Vulkan support is supplied by MoltenVK, which we now ship with the game. It should work on any Mac that supports Apple’s Metal API, which MoltenVK uses to make Vulkan work. You can change from OpenGL to Vulkan in-game in the “Video” options menu.

European Union-funded researchers have today released a tool suite which enables developers to deliver longer battery life in mobile devices, while ensuring high quality and performance. The LPGPU2 tool-suite helps programmers develop power-efficient code for GPUs by identifying bottlenecks relating to performance (for example in terms of frames-per-second) and power (for example in terms of energy per instruction). The LPGPU2 tool suite has benefited from the expertise of a range of academic and industrial partners including Khronos members Samsung, who designed and implemented the data collection frameworks and feedback engine; Think Silicon validated it on their four-core NEMA GPU system and Codeplay extended AMD’s CodeXL tool, allowing programmers to profile their SYCL applications. Download the tool suite from the GitHub repository.

Nikkei Electronics Magazine interviewed Neil Trevett, president of The Khronos Group about recent Khronos API highlights, including OpenXR. During the interview, Neil mentioned that we have received many supporters to OpenXR from broad industry and VR/AR community.

AMD released Vulkan Memory Allocator 1.0 (VMA) back in July last year, but haven’t posted much since. Version 2.0 of the library was released back in March 2018 and now version 2.1 has been released. This post gives an overview of the changes and version 2.1 is all about.

Some members of the Vulkan working group are developing a multi-vendor EXT extension for transform feedback with the primary goal of satisfying the needs of the DXVK, vkd3d and ANGLE translation layers. The Vulkan working group does not plan to promote this functionality as a KHR extension or as core functionality because it believes there are better, more forward-looking ways of processing and capturing vertex data with the GPU. The multi-vendor EXT extension should be available soon and is likely to be implemented on those platforms where DXVK, vkd3d and ANGLE translation is required.

There have been some discussions around an updated glTF material model to support additional capabilities. Check out this requirements gathering exercise to understand what kind of capabilities everyone would like to see in the next gen material model for glTF. Are there additional capabilities anyone would like to see? Any preferences or priorities on what we should go after next from the list above? Please let us know.

This mini-tutorial presents a simple use-case the new VK_EXT_conditional_rendering extension. With the new VK_EXT_conditional_rendering extension, Vulkan gains the possibility to execute certain rendering and dispatch commands conditionally, based on values stored in a dedicated buffer. So instead of having to rebuild command buffers if the visibility of objects change it’s now to possible to just change a single buffer value and the to control if the rendering commands for that object are executed without the need to touch any command buffers.

Codeplay are pleased to announce that Andrew Richards, CEO & Founder, Charles Macfarlane, VP Marketing & Rod Burns, Developer Relations Manager, will be at this year’s AutoSens in Brussels, exhibiting from 17th to 20th September. Codeplay will be there to discuss the use of open standards such as OpenCL and SYCL on heterogeneous processor solutions to enable the latest vision and machine learning applications for automotive.

A 3D version of the Khronos logo has just been uploaded to Sketchfab. This brings our total models to twelve. All of the 3D logo’s are available for download from Sketchfab. Vector and bitmap versions of all of the Khronos and Khronos Standards logos are available from our Logo and Trademark page.

MoltenVK 1.0.20 is out as the latest feature update to this Vulkan-over-Metal layer. With the MoltenVK 1.0.20 release there is support for several new extensions including VK_KHR_maintenance1, VK_KHR_shader_draw_parameters, VK_KHR_get_physical_device_properties2, and VK_KHR_push_descriptor. MoltenVK 1.0.20 also adds the ability to track and access supported/enabled extensions and has re-based its SPIRV-Cross code against upstream.

Vulkan multi-GPU support was announced by Khronos in March 2017 but it wasn’t until Vulkan 1.1 was released in March this year that explicit multi-GPU support was added to the API. Now the first AAA game to support multi-GPU in Vulkan has been released - the action-packed Strange Brigade for PC.