Today, The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.

Today, The Khronos Group announces that its Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group has received strong industry support and is transitioning to a full Working Group to create an analytic rendering interface API for data visualization. This new API will be called ‘ANARI’. Any interested company is invited to join Khronos and participate in the ANARI™ Working Group under the consortium’s multi-company governance process to have a voice and a vote in the creation of this open, royalty-free standard. This initiative is expected to be of particular interest to any company creating scientific visualization rendering engines, libraries and applications.