KittyCAD is an infrastructure company, bringing together everything required to build tools for hardware designers. Our vision is to make these tools as programmable as the rest of the internet. We take a technology-first approach to hardware design, so that you can use KittyCAD’s APIs to build tools, automation, websites, and apps.

Inseye is a new camera-free eye tracking technology. Inseye delivers outstanding performance at the market’s lowest BOM by combining simple hardware with powerful software. Flexible, lightweight, industrial design allows hardware integration with new modern AR, VR, and MR devices. Additionally, developers can benefit from unique eye movement dynamics data. We encourage companies and researchers exploring new applications of XR technology and eye-tracking to collaborate with us. Create new use cases using the world’s only 1000Hz eye tracker available in the XR environment.

In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively called ‘Vulkan Video’, for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. Today, Khronos is releasing finalized extensions that incorporate industry feedback and expose core and decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.

Khronos will release an ongoing series of Vulkan Video extensions to enable additional codecs and accelerated encode as well as decode. This blog is a general overview of the Vulkan Video architecture and also provides details about the finalized extensions and links to important resources to help you create your first Vulkan Video applications.

Now we have a driver with previously no compute capabilities running some CL kernels and some OpenCL-CTS tests on the VIM3 NPU. This means that the work done here could also be the basis for implementing GL ES 3.1 compute shaders on Etnaviv.

Charter Communications, Inc. is a leading broadband connectivity company and cable operator serving more than 32 million customers in 41 states through its Spectrum brand. Over an advanced communications network, the company offers a full range of state-of-the-art residential and business services including Spectrum Internet®, TV, Mobile and Voice.

LunarG has released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.3.236, including new loader environment variables that support advanced debugging of layer and driver issues plus new extensions.

Khronos is thrilled to welcome Tencent, one of the largest internet, gaming, and mobile hardware and software companies in the world, to the Khronos Board of Directors, joining promoter members AMD, Apple, Arm, Epic Games, Google, Huawei, IKEA, Imagination Technologies, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony, Valve and Verisilicon. Tencent aims to play a significant role in the development and adoption of Khronos open standards, and to make a substantial local impact through growing the use of those standards by the Chinese industry. Tencent is a world-leading internet and technology company that develops innovative products and services to improve the quality of life of people around the world. Founded in 1998 with its headquarters in Shenzhen, China, Tencent’s guiding principle is to use technology for good. As one of the world’s largest internet, gaming and mobile hardware and software companies, with over a billion users in China, Tencent’s contributions to Khronos Group’s evolving open standards for 3D graphics, XR, gaming, metaverse, and more will be invaluable.

Calle Lejdfors, R&D Director of Tencent Games, will serve on the Khronos Board of Directors. Calle has been doing professional computer graphics since the late 90’s. He started with scientific visualization on SGI machines, worked his way through a PhD, and then left academia for the games industry. There he has worked for the last 15 years or so doing everything from hands-on programming, team lead, to technical direction and strategy. He currently works at Tencent leading the European R&D efforts in the game and XR space. Calle is based out of Sweden.

Khronos welcomes Tencent as a key player and thought leader in the XR and gaming space and looks forward to seeing the company engage with its membership.

Portal with RTX reimagines Valve’s classic game with full Vulkan ray tracing. Building on NVIDIA’s previous upgrades to Quake II RTX and Minecraft with RTX, this new release has been created with the NVIDIA RTX Remix tool that enables modders to create ambitious remasters of classic games with NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex and advanced path-tracing that bounces light four times for improved light simulation—even casting through portals! Portal with RTX is freely downloadable from Steam for all Portal owners.

The recently released VK_EXT_surface_maintenance1 and VK_EXT_swapchain_maintenance1 extensions resolve a number of longstanding issues with Vulkan’s WSI extensions. These extensions will be ratified as KHR.

Most importantly, it is now possible for applications to know when resources associated with a present operation can be destroyed, e.g. the semaphores provided in VkPresentInfoKHR::pWaitSemaphores. This is done by providing a fence in VkSwapchainPresentFenceInfoEXT that is chained to VkPresentInfoKHR. Once the fence is signaled, the application can destroy said semaphores. Additionally, with the outstanding present operations processed according to these fences, the application is able to safely destroy swapchains (retired or otherwise).

Vulkanised is delighted to be back in person! The largest event dedicated to 3D developers using the Vulkan API will take place in the beautiful city of Munich in Germany on Feb 7-9, 2023. Vulkanised is a unique technical event that brings the Vulkan developer community together to exchange ideas, solve problems and help steer the future development of the Vulkan API and ecosystem. Over the three days of the event developers will learn from leading Vulkan experts and gain real-world insights into the latest Vulkan developments, extensions, applications, techniques, technologies and tools.

Early bird registration is now open until January 20th. Register now and save!

Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, gave a keynote speech at inVISION on November 29th focusing on vision standards & the new Kamaros embedded camera API standard. The video from the keynote is now available (free registration required).

With RapidCompact’s recent release of version 6, they’ve added impressive new features and several improvements for handling 3D models. Among the changes is support for the glTF iridescence extension. Read their blog for the complete list of changes with this new release.

PoCL 3.1 provides compatibility with the LLVM/Clang 15.0 release, switches to using lowercase device names for the platform setup via the “POCL_DEVICES” environment variable, there has been a major rework to the custom device driver, much improved SPIR-V support, continued work towards implementing a Vulkan driver, and a basic OpenCL cl_khr_command_buffer implementation.

NVIDIA RTX™ IO is a suite of technologies that enables rapid GPU-based asset decompression and loading. NVIDIA’s GDeflate GPU decompression format delivers IO-saturating performance on modern NVMe devices. GDeflate is used in Microsoft’s DirectStorage API, and now NVIDIA is contributing the technology for consideration by the Vulkan working group at Khronos. Two new NVIDIA Vulkan extensions to accelerate RTX IO are were released in the Vulkan 1.3.233 update and are supported in the latest NVIDIA drivers on both Linux and Windows. VK_NV_memory_decompression handles decompressing assets on GPU, and VK_NV_copy_memory_indirect handles copying decompressed data to Vulkan buffers/images.

Two open-source Nintendo emulator projects recently posted updates on their success in shipping on macOS using the open source MoltenVK ‘Vulkan over Metal’ runtime library:

• Ryujinx Switch Emulator Uses MoltenVK to Ship on Mac
  “All in all, we’re pleased with what we’ve managed to accomplish. A barrier that many, including ourselves, originally thought unbreakable has been cracked wide open, and the best part is: this is just the beginning. With not only our own efforts to improve the core emulation, but upcoming updates to Metal 3 and the constantly improving MoltenVK, the experience is only going to get better”
• Dolphin GameCube and the Wii Emulator Compares Metal Native Backend and MoltenVK
  “We will be relying on MoltenVK to be the benchmark that we compare our native Metal backend against going forward. And it should perform that role excellently, as it is bringing our well tested Vulkan backend to macOS through a very well supported translation layer from a team that has earned our trust. So, while our new native Metal backend is faster, MoltenVK is here to stay. Together, they will help us deliver the most consistently reliable and performant experience that we can give to our macOS users”