The Khronos Group held their annual BOF-Blitz at SIGGRAPH today. There were five BOFs in all, and they were all a huge success. If you were not able to get to SIGGRAPH and you missed the live stream, you can now watch the video online here.
Khronos member MAXON announced the next generation of its professional 3D application, Cinema 4D Release 19 (R19), which offers both tools and enhancements artists can put to use immediately, and provides a peek at the future. MAXON will debut Cinema 4D R19 during SIGGRAPH 2017 in LA, where the developer can be found at booth #701. MAXON has introduced OpenGL capabilities in BodyPaint 3D, MAXON’s professional paint and texturing toolset.
NVIDIA is releasing a new version of Falcor, so that it now supports both DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs. Vulkan is being used to improve mobile visuals including that of VR. Falcor provides support for ORCA assets and is available for download from Github.
There’s now a JavaScript library for executing neural networks inside a webpage, using the hardware-accelerated graphics API available in modern web browsers. Developed by a team of MIT graduate students, TensorFire can run TensorFlow-style machine learning models on any GPU. TensorFire works using the WebGL standard, a cross-platform system for rendering GPU-accelerated graphics in browsers. WebGL supports GLSL, a C-like language used to write shaders, which are short programs used to transform data directly on the GPU.
SIGGRAPH 2017: Two great sessions today covering OpenGL, Vulkan and WebGL. Be sure not to miss "Cesium: 3D Globes on the Web" at 10:30AM and in the afternoon "NVIDIA: OpenGL and Vulkan Support for 2017". Get details on these sessions and other Khronos standards related sessions on the new Khronos website.
Only a few days after the 1.35.x release, GPU Caps Viewer 1.36.x has been released with support for OpenGL 4.6. OpenGL 4.6 introduces the support of SPIR-V modules in OpenGL and the set of SPIR-V extensions is listed exposed in the OpenGL panel. There are a few Vulkan improvements as well in this version. GPU Caps Viewer is a graphics card information utility focused on the OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL and CUDA API level support of the main (primary) graphics card.
Right on the heels of the OpenGL 4.6 announcement, GLEW 2.1 arrives, updated for 4.6 and other new extensions. Pull the latest GLEW code from github. Hats off to Nigel Stewart.
To coincide with the release of OpenGL 4.6, NVIDIA is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our OpenGL 4.6 beta drivers for Windows and Linux. These drivers provide full OpenGL 4.6 and GLSL 4.60 functionality and also add support for the GL_KHR_parallel_shader_compile extension released today. This beta release is based on the published OpenGL 4.6 Khronos Specification, and is expected to pass the OpenGL 4.6 Khronos Conformance Testing Process when available. Current conformance status can be found online. Further details and driver downloads are available at the NVIDIA OpenGL driver website.
The Khronos Group announces from the SIGGRAPH 2017 Conference the immediate public availability of the OpenGL 4.6 specification. OpenGL 4.6 integrates the functionality of numerous ARB and EXT extensions created by Khronos members AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA into core, including the capability to ingest SPIR-V shaders. Learn more about this release. Khronos encourages and welcomes all feedback on the new specification.
The Khronos Group announces new API updates and roadmap decisions at SIGGRAPH 2017. Included in the announcements: OpenGL Celebrates 25th Anniversary with Release of OpenGL 4.6; glTF Ecosystem Grows; Khronos Announces the Vulkan Portability Initiative; Khronos Launches New Website
The glTF working group has posted it's roadmap, and would like to hear what you wish for in the upcoming version of glTF. The request from @pjcozzi "please chime in with any and all feedback to help drive the direction of glTF beyond 2.0. Even simple +1/-1's for topics are appreciated."
In preparation for the launch of its upcoming Vega graphics cards, AMD has released Radeon Software Crimson ReLive version 17.7.2. With the release of Radeon Software 17.7.2, AMD has extended Radeon Chill to support DX12 and Vulkan.
Oculus' vision is to see more headsets connecting into the Oculus platform via the OpenXR initiative. Oculus is one of the key contributors to OpenXR since the very beginning. Read the entire post on RoadtoVR.
A new version of GPU Caps Viewer is ready. GPU Caps Viewer 1.35.0 comes with an improved Vulkan support. The Vulkan panel has been simplified and shows more information (layers, hardware features). Vulkan demos (based on GeeXLab engine) have been updated to properly work on all Vulkan-capable GPUs (NVIDIA, AMD and Intel).
Amazon AppStream 2.0 is introducing Graphics Desktop and Graphics Pro instance families to deliver high performance graphics applications from AWS. The Graphics Desktop instance family offers a single instance type with an NVIDIA GPU based on K520 with 1,536 CUDA cores, 8 vCPUs, 15 GiB system memory, and 4 GiB graphics memory. This instance type is ideal for running desktop graphics applications such as Siemens NX, SolidWorks, ESRI ArcGIS, and other applications that use DirectX, OpenGL, OpenCL, and CUDA.