This presentation walks through a real-world example of taking an application from DirectX 12 to Vulkan ray tracing - including missteps, obstacles and insights encountered along the way. It also covers recommendations for tooling setup and techniques to get your ray tracing journey smoothly underway.

​The Khronos Group would like to Welcome Sidequest as an Associate member. At SideQuest we believe that XR deserves an open future to be able to properly flourish, and we at SideQuest are delighted to be able to support that future. OpenXR is the working group we are particularly interested and we plan on showing our support by helping our partners, developers and users to see the benefits that OpenXR provides.

Raspberry Pi has announced that their V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for Raspberry Pi 4 has demonstrated Vulkan 1.0 conformance. The conformance process is a way to ensure that Khronos standards are consistently implemented by multiple vendors, so as to create a reliable platform for application developers.

Today, Nsight Graphics ships with support for the final version of the Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions; VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, VK_KHR_ray_query and VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline. This includes some additional GLSL and SPIR-V extensions.

Today, Khronos has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the existing Vulkan framework. This is a significant milestone as it is the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration - and can be deployed either using existing GPU compute or dedicated ray tracing cores. Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, but also introduces advanced functionality such as the ability to load balance ray tracing setup operations onto the host CPU. Although ray tracing will be first deployed on desktop systems, these Vulkan extensions have been designed to enable and encourage ray tracing to also be deployed on mobile. Additionally, Khronos has posted a blog on “Vulkan Ray Tracing Best Practices for Hybrid Rendering” which explores ray tracing techniques in Wolfenstein: Youngblood.

The newly formed 3D Commerce Working Group is tasked with exploring the opportunity to accelerate the adoption of 3D experiences by establishing a set of universal standards for platform-agnostic 3D model creation and distribution.

Shrenik Sadalgi, Director of the Next R&D Group at Wayfair and Chair of the 3D Commerce Working Group, believes the industry needs standards and guidelines so that 3D content can be experienced consistently across a variety of platforms and on a variety of devices. Other challenges that standardization can help address include optimizing industry workflows to minimize cost, and bringing down barriers to entry for retailers and technologists. “Bringing this kind of radical change across the retail industry will require collaboration between many different retail and technology companies.”

The Khronos Group is a consortium of over 150 hardware and software companies who help define standards for various compute, graphics, and media APIs (e.g. if you’ve worked with computer graphics, then you’ve probably already come across one of their more familiar specifications), but the work of the Khronos Group goes well beyond graphics to include OpenXR, OpenCL, and several other active standards.

Creating open standards and specifications (i.e., cross-platform APIs) requires a breadth of knowledge to ensure they provide a rich set of functionality while allowing for future innovations. Thus, the importance of having a consortium with such a large number of members cannot be understated.

It’s been two years already since the release of the OpenMP 5.0 specification and the update released on Friday is quite a worthy update:

OpenMP 5.1 introduces a new interop construct for improving interoperability with non-OpenMP device execution contexts. This aims to improve the portability of OpenMP 5.1+ to non-native interfaces/accelerators. This interop construct is designed with NVIDIA CUDA, AMD ROCm/HIP, and OpenCL in mind. The interop construct is used for dealing with interoperability properties for one or more “foreign runtime environments”.

Microsoft has released a compatibility pack that allows you to run any OpenCL and OpenGL apps on a Windows 10 PC that doesn’t have OpenCL and OpenGL hardware drivers installed by default. If you have a DirectX 12 driver installed on your Windows 10 PC, supported apps will run with hardware acceleration for better performance.

The PlayCanvas team announced the Editor support of glTF GLB conversion with model and animation imports. This gives developers an order of magnitude reduction in load times compared to the JSON format while keeping similar gzipped download size. Using the Stanford Dragon model (2,613,679 vertices, 871,414 triangles), we can compare GLB and JSON parse times on a Macbook Pro 16 inch. The JSON format took over 3 secs just to parse the data, a peak memory usage of ~498 MB and a gzipped package size of 28.1MB. GLB speeds ahead taking only 0.193 secs which is 17x faster, uses a peak of ~25.2 MB of memory and a gzipped package size of 25.7MB!

Codeplay recognized that there are few resources for safety practitioners and programmers looking at developing applications with SYCL that are required to meet functional safety requirements. This three part series of blog posts will give readers an overview of what they need to know about using SYCL in a safety-critical environment. The information is most relevant to safety practitioners working with SYCL, but equally will help to educate developers working on low-level drivers for DSPs and other processors.

• Part 1 - An Introduction
  
• Part 2 - SYCL for Automotive AI and ADAS applications
  
• Part 3 - SYCL ADAS Applications Topology Explained
  

NIST’s mission is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life.

In the world of e-commerce, many products come in different options, or variants. When shopping online, for example, colors and materials of a brand of shoe might have an image representing each option. And now, in addition to using 2D images, more and more retailers are starting to use 3D and AR to merchandise products in online channels to enable customers to more fully experience products or view items in their environment in rich 3D. Each time a customer views a different colored shoe, there’s a good chance that another complete 3D model is being loaded just to display that color variant. This leads to increased download times and wasted bandwidth as the files contain a lot of redundant data, including downloading exactly the same geometry multiple times. In turn this causes increased memory usage on the device, and slower interactivity, resulting in a poor customer experience. Learn how the Khronos Group and the 3D Commerce working group is improving this.

For the release of the first add-on for Doom Eternal, we received the offer to talk to id Software’s lead engine programmer Billy Khan about the technology of the game and id tech in general. In the extensive interview, Billy unpacks details about the Vulkan API used, storage management, LoD and streaming systems and many other interesting aspects. This interview is originally in German, we are supplying a Google translate version in English.

The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer. Learn more here.