The Khronos Group has updated the Birds of a Feather schedule and speaker list. If you will be at #SIGGRAPH2017 be sure to visit the BOF Blitz and After Party! BOFs include: OpenVX, NNEF, OpenCL and SYCL; COLLADA; glTF; WebGL; OpenXR; and Vulkan, OpenGL & OpenGL ES to wrap up the day. glTF has just posted their list of speakers, and what a line they have for you in store for you. At the end of the day, be sure to hang around for the BOF Blitz After-Party. The BOFs will be live streamed with video available afterwards, and t-shirts available online, for all those folks not attending.
The entire WebGL Insights book is now available for free in PDF format with permission from CRC Press. The 23 chapters on advanced WebGL topics from 42 authors and 25 reviewers is basically still the only book on _advanced_ WebGL. Get your copy today, and start making awesome WebGL content.
Researchers at CMU and NVIDIA have developed an open source shading language and compiler framework named Spire enhanced to support shader components for high-performance rendering. The Spire compiler can generate either GLSL or SPIR-V output for use with OpenGL and Vulkan based engines. The work interfaces with a modernmini 3D engine that supports equivalent back-ends for both OpenGL and Vulkan. The researchers will present this year’s work at SIGGRAPH next week which builds on a paper from last year’s SIGGRAPH.
The glTF working group has announced that the Blender glTF 2.0 exporter documentation is complete… for now. Take a look, and if anything is not clear, or you see errors or improvements, please create a pull request or raise an issue on Github.
Attending SIGGRAPH 2017 next week? OpenGL developers should attend this free NVIDIA session on Monday, July 31 to get the most out of OpenGL on Quadro, GeForce, and Tegra GPUs. Hear from an OpenGL expert at NVIDIA how the OpenGL continues to evolve. See how NVIDIA's Nsight developer tools make OpenGL development easier for you. Learn how your application can benefit from NVIDIA advancing OpenGL as a cross-platform, open industry standard. See this schedule for a complete list of NVIDIA content at SIGGRAPH.
With help from Khronos member Collabora, employee Alexandros Frantzis created vkmark, which aims to provide an extensible suite of targeted, configurable benchmarking scenes for Vulkan. Most scenes exercise specific Vulkan features or usage patterns (e.g., desktop 2.5D scenarios), although we are also happy to have more complex, visually intriguing scenes. vkmark Vulkan benchmark is available on GitHub.
One of the key differences between OpenGL and Vulkan -and something that needs careful consideration when porting to Vulkan, is the coordinate system. Vulkan requires the right hand NDC space compared to GL that requires the left hand. Learn about the KHR_VK_maintainance1 extension and see how AnKi is flipping the viewport.
The newest Apple iMac 21.5-inch with Retina 4K display (mid-2017) has scored quite well on the CineBench R15 OpenGL benchmark. The 2015 21.5-inch iMac managed 47fps while the new 2017 model scored 94 fps.
Intel has released their Graphics Driver 15.46 to provide launch support, as well as bugfixes, feature updates, Computer Vision and AI application development support, and support for Windows 10 Creator’s Update features. The driver is only for Windows 10 64-bit. Intel has enabled additional OpenCL media extensions, as well as a few preview extensions. In addition, 15.46 brings support for OpenGL v4.5, Vulkan v1.0.38, and programmable sample positions in Direct3D12.
Stephanie Hurlburt, one founder of Khronos member Binomial recently put out a call for beginner-friendly ways to learn Vulkan. The result is a nicely curated list of Vulkan Tutorials that one can call beginner level. Read more about Stephanie's thoughts on learning Vulkan, and then dive in yourself.
ArrayFire announced the release of ArrayFire v3.5, an open source library of parallel computing functions supporting CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU devices. This new version of ArrayFire improves features and performance for applications in machine learning, computer vision, signal processing, statistics, finance, and more. Release notes are available and the source code can be found on Github.
LunarG has released an update to their SDK for Vulkan 1.0.54.0. Lots of changes include new groups of extension functionality: external fence extensions, external semaphore extensions, external memory extensions, storage memory extensions and additional vendor and cross-vendor extensions. Learn more about the LunarG Vulkan SDK.
In collaboration with Google, Codeplay is proud to announce the release of a new open-source tool allowing the compilation of OpenCL C language kernels to run on the Vulkan API. The tool, named 'clspv', allows a subset of the OpenCL C language to be targeted at the Vulkan API. This tool allows developers to port code containing more than a million lines of OpenCL C to run on the Vulkan API. The source is available on Github.
Shenzhen Goke Semiconductor Co., Ltd (SGKS) has selected VeriSilicon Vivante GC7000UL-VX for the SGKS6802X Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) chip, part of SGKS’s ADAS product line used by automotive electronic components partners. The GC7000UL-VX is uniquely suitable for ADAS products with deep and efficient integration of vision and graphic processing in one IP that provides comprehensive and unified software stack support including OpenVX, OpenCV, OpenCL, OpenGL ES 3.1, and Vulkan 1.0.
The entire WebGL Insights book is now available for free in