The COLLADA files loader in Minko 2 now provides much faster parsing times. Tests show some of files now take up to 10 times less time to load. You can now load 100+MB *.DAE files containing 600 000 polygons and more, including animations. Another important addition is that we now parse a lot more data about the materials. We are now able to load material values such as the reflectivity, shininess and more to make it easier for the artists to customize the rendering using their favorite CAO tool.
There will be five courses offered at Siggraph 2012 that relate to Khronos Technologies. Starting on August 5th followed by one course each day, there will be "Introduction to Modern OpenGL", "Virtual Texturing in Software and Hardware", "Beyond Programmable Shading", "GPU Shaders for OpenGL 4.x" and finally on August 9th "Graphics Programming for the Web." See all Khronos related events at Siggraph 2012 on the Khronos Group Siggraph event page.
Sketchfab went live recently with new technology making it easy to publish interactive 3D content online. The free service does not require any third-party application installed on either the client side or the server. All Sketchfab needs is for the end-user to be running a WebGL compatible browser.
AMD today announced a collaboration with Adobe Systems Incorporated to optimize a new set of GPU-accelerated features for Adobe products including the newly announced Adobe Photoshop CS6. Implementing GPU acceleration and incorporating OpenCL optimization improves the end-user experience by dramatically speeding up critical imaging features and generating real-time results when editing with key tools in Adobe Creative Suite 6.
After five WebGL Camps in the USA, WebGL Camp is now coming to Europe being hosted by the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. WebGL Camp Europe is now looking for speakers. A limited number (1-2) of non-European based presentations via Skype will be possible too. WebGL Camp Europe takes place July 3rd, 2012 in Muttenz/Basel, Switzerland. On July 4th there will be optional WebGL workshops/tutorials. More information at: http://www.shader.org/webglcamp
Adobe announced that they will be using their newly enhanced Adobe Mercury Playback Engine that incorporates OpenCL heterogeneous compute for the very first time on a number of Apple MacBook Pro laptops with AMD Radeon graphics.
The OpenCL hardware acceleration features in the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) were originally developed as part of Google's Summer of Code in 2009 and 2011 and finished over the winter with sponsorship from AMD and help by MulticoreWare. On supported systems, this feature should greatly speed up processor intensive operations. Users have to start the application with the command line parameter GEGL_USE_OPENCL=yes to use OpenCL.
MulticoreWare Inc. has announced the Multicore Cross-platform Architecture (MXPA), an OpenCL runtime and compiler, enabling cross-architecture performance from a single, unified codebase. MXPA is designed to preserve the expression of parallelism in OpenCL, independent of vendor hardware and software stack implementation. MXPA currently supports x86 architectures and is being extended to a wide range of platforms from CPUs to DSPs with minimal vendor support.