Path of Exile has released their 3.10.2 Patch, which includes a beta version of our Vulkan renderer. To access the new Vulkan renderer, launch the game and go to the Graphics Options screen. Then change the Renderer option to “Vulkan (Beta)”. It should take effect without you having to relaunch Path of Exile. “Our philosophy with the Vulkan renderer is frame rate consistency, so that players can enjoy Path of Exile without stuttering/spikes at arbitrary times.”

The Khronos Group publicly releases the OpenVG 1.1 Lite Provisional Specification for advanced 2D vector and raster graphics, with conformance tests placed into open source under the Apache 2.0 license. OpenVG 1.1 Lite enables this high-quality 2D vector graphics API to be fully accelerated by any OpenGL ES 2.0-compatible GPU for the first time, significantly increasing the range of devices on which it can be deployed. The Provisional Specification is released in markdown format on GitHub to enable the developer community to provide input and feedback before the specification and conformance tests are finalized.

Holochip was founded on the philosophy that the emergence of affordable, durable, and high-quality variable-focus lenses signifies a new and sustainable photonics market segment - the adaptive lens - born at the crossroads of traditional lenses and adaptive optics. Widespread adoption of high quality adaptive lenses will enable a new generation of lighter, more capable and lower cost, display, imaging and laser systems. We will enable engineers, scientists, product developers and consumers with innovative solutions for utilizing and manipulating light.

In the latest Steam Beta from May 25, a new option in the Shader Pre-Caching settings, allows you to enable “Allow background processing of Vulkan shaders”. This is a step towards making Steam games on Linux run smoother. For those interested in a little background, it’s using the Fossilize library and Vulkan layer which you can find on Valve’s GitHub.

Nsight Graphics 2020.3 is now available for download. Applications that use the provisional VK_KHR_ray_tracing extension can be captured, profiled and exported to a C++ Capture. While the extension is still evolving, the NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver will allow for experimentation before it is fully ratified (and is required).

On June 2nd, Christine Perey of PEREY Research & Consulting will host a public webinar: Paul Davies of the Boeing Company will share how following the progress of OpenXR and other standards is helping companies future-proof their deployments and investments in AR technologies; Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group, and Brent Insko, Lead VR Architect at Intel and OpenXR Working Group Chair, will present the OpenXR architecture, and provide an overview of a typical OpenXR application lifecycle including the order of function calls, creation of objects, session state changes, and the rendering loop.

C++ Ray-Tracing in a Weekend by Peter Shirley is a great resource to start learning about ray-tracers and how to implement one, and at the same time providing all the source code in a GitHub repository. The main goal of this blog post is not to teach the concepts of ray-tracing, Peter does a great job of that, but provide a walk-through tutorial on how to accelerate practical applications and algorithms using SYCL. Read on to learn more.

At Laval Virtual, Ryan Pavlik presented “Unifying Reality: Building Experiences with OpenXR”, a master class on OpenXR, the open standard API for building VR and AR experiences that work across devices, now and into the future. With version OpenXR 1.0 officially released at SIGGRAPH 2019, the standard has grown through increased adoption, vendor and multi-vendor extensions for additional functionality, and the upcoming release of the conformance test suite for verifying runtimes. As the OpenXR specification editor, Ryan provided an in-depth look at how the OpenXR application is structured, how the “action”-based interaction system works, and more. Below is the full recording and slides of his presentation. You can also see what his talk was like in VR here.

Connect directly with NVIDIA Developer Technology Engineers on OpenGL and Vulkan-related topics to get answers to all of your questions. Whether you have questions about regular graphics use, compute shaders, ray tracing, or interop between the apis, we’re here to help you with questions around the Khronos graphics apis. Space is limited to 150 people, so don’t wait to sign-up.

The Half Life: Alyx Workshop update adds a native Linux version of the game using the Vulkan rendering API, as well as optional support for using Vulkan on Windows. Depending on your system, you may experience better performance using Vulkan, especially if your system is closer to minimum spec.

The Khronos Group is evaluating possible new helper libraries for the Vulkan API and would appreciate your input through the survey link below. By participating in this survey you will help us to understand the level of demand and priorities for any future helper libraries we may develop. If you have any questions, please contact Kris Rose on Slack.

Take the Survey!

With Chrome’s WebXR implementation for AR now shipping with Chrome 81 and WebXR Support in the new release of the project, AR on the web is easier than ever with no native app required. Now you can place glTF 3D model in your space without leaving your browser. Find out how in the recent Google guest post on the Khronos Blog.

​Collabora announces the 0.14 release of xrdesktop, the Open Source project which enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR. The most exciting improvement is that xrdesktop is now able to run on XR runtimes providing the OpenXR API, which enables running xrdesktop on a full Open Source stack with Monado.

In the latest Quora Q&A, Shrenik Sadalgi discusses what is the next big step in retail technology, why online retailers should care about technologies like AR/VR, how the 3D Commerce Working Group fits into the bigger picture, far future research and more.

​Diligent Engine was just tagged 2.4.e on Github. With this release comes support for Vulkan on Android. Last October Diligent Engine 2.4.c saw support for macOS via MoltenVK.