The Khronos Group announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020. Vulkan continues to evolve by listening to developer needs, shipping new functionality as extensions, and then consolidating extensions that receive positive developer feedback into a unified core API specification. Khronos and the Vulkan community will support Vulkan 1.2 in a wide range of open source compilers, tools, and debuggers by the end of January 2020. Driver release updates will be posted on the Vulkan Public Release Tracker.
Find more information on the Vulkan 1.2 specification and associated tests and tools at:
Vulkan Working Group member James Jones, Principal Software Engineer at NVIDIA, has written a Khronos Blog on using Vulkan Timeline Semaphores in Vulkan 1.2. The new timeline semaphore synchronization API shipping as VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore, and a core feature of Vulkan 1.2, defines a primitive containing a superset of both the original VkSemaphore and VkFence primitives, while simultaneously eliminating many of the most painful limitations of the previous APIs. Learn how this new feature in Vulkan 1.2 works with code examples.
Core Avionics & Industrial Inc. announced today that it has achieved formal Khronos Group compliance for its VkCoreGL SC1 (OpenGL SC 1.0.1) application library running on its Vulkan-based VkCore SC graphics and compute driver. Successful passing Khronos’ conformance testing process ensures implementation quality and provides implementor protection via the Khronos Intellectual Property Framework. Adhering to open software standards is a key part of CoreAVI’s philosophy and this compliance provides customers with the standards-based confidence they require for safety critical software products. CoreAVI is the chair of Khronos’ Vulkan Safety Critical Working Group to define a formal safety critical version of Vulkan and is continually focused on driving forward new standards to support true safety critical compute capabilities using graphics processors.
Diligent Engine is a modern cross-platform abstraction layer for Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Direct3D11 and Direct3D12. In release v2.4.b, Diligent Engine enabled MSAA and bindless resources, implemented GPU queries, added new tutorials as well as made major improvements to code quality assurance by enabling automated unit tests, format validation and static code analysis.
Datakit’s latest 2D and 3D data exchange software update comes with many new features. The previous version of the Datakit software had added the possibility of converting files to FBX and glTF with CrossManager. These formats have now also been added to CrossCad/Ware, the Datakit SDK. Software developers can now offer to export FBX or glTF files from their own software by integrating the Datakit API.
GPUOpen has announced the release of Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) v1.7. This release adds support for the latest Radeon graphics cards: the RX 5500 series and the RX 5300 series. RGP generates easy to understand visualizations of how your DirectX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL applications interact with the GPU at the hardware level. Profiling a game is both a quick and simple process using the Radeon Developer Panel and our public GPU driver.
The aim of this guide from Codeplay Software is to summarize and analyze the different techniques for deciding what work group size to use for optimal performance, and explain what needs to be considered when choosing an ideal work group size value. The techniques covered in the guide are a summary of the most common ones used across the GPGPU industry, not just for SYCL.
Some light Friday afternoon reading on OpenXR Frame Timing from @casseveritt. The concept of frame timing in traditional display real-time graphics is not particularly complex. There’s a frame loop that is usually throttled in some way to align with the refresh rate of the display. And for the most part, apps can use the current time as a plausible estimation of when the frame they’re currently defining will be displayed. Head mounted displays introduce much greater latency sensitivity because we need the images (one per eye) that are currently being displayed to be based on your actual current head pose. If they aren’t, your human visual system will be Very Unhappy. Read-on to learn about Frame Timing with OpenXR.
Jon Peddie Research’s 2019 year in review includes a Khronos 2019 review by Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group, including working group successes and milestones.
Recent advances in rendering technology have dramatically improved data visualization, delivering imagery that is highly physically accurate and visual cues that allow users to intuitively understand complex data sets. Particularly, the introduction of real-time ray tracing has gone a long way to advance the technology. However, while these graphical techniques are, indeed, impressive, their application developments are intensely complex and often too expensive. Read more to learn how The Khronos Group’s new Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group seeks to find a solution.
Founder and CTO of Third Dimension Technologies (TDT) recently gave a SMPTE webinar for members titled “Streaming Model for Field of Light Displays” (SMFoLD). The webinar focused not on the displays themselves, but the technology needed to stream real-time field of light video with synchronized sound over more-or-less ordinary network connections. TDT is working on this problem along with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in a project managed by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The title of the project is “Open Standard for Display Agnostic 3D Streaming” (DA3DS). The DA3DS project has taken the approach of transmitting not the images but the OpenGL primitive graphics calls over the network along with the data needed by the OpenGL calls. Learn how the DA3DS project is using OpenGL and how OpenXR plays a part.
NVIDIA has updated their sample framework and have added lots of new Vulkan content. There was a big focus on Raytracing for Vulkan and how to add that to OpenGL. Most samples now support loading glTF 2.0 models.
At the start of the year Khronos Group member migenius began introducing glTF 2.0 related features to RealityServer, beginning with support for importing glTF content with their PBR materials. Paul Arden, CEO of migenius has now written about the export half of the glTF equation for RealityServer. migenius plans to continue improving both the import and the export features. Paul invites you to share your ideas on what you’d like to see next.
