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Press Release

Khronos Releases Graphics API Updates and Demonstrates Ecosystem Advancement at SIGGRAPH 2017

Khronos rolls out OpenGL 4.6, highlights significant momentum for glTF and announces Vulkan Portability Initiative

July 31, 2017 – 6:00 AM PT – SIGGRAPH – Los Angeles – The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announces new API updates and roadmap decisions at SIGGRAPH 2017. Khronos standards are fundamental to many of the technologies on display at SIGGRAPH and the group is providing open education, training, and workshops to the community to accelerate the development and deployment of cross-platform APIs.

Khronos announces recent API developments this week at SIGGRAPH including:

  • OpenGL® Celebrates 25th Anniversary with Release of OpenGL 4.6: OpenGL 4.6, the most feature-rich version of OpenGL yet, 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. OpenGL 4.6 is publicly available today. Read more at https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-opengl-4.6-with-spir-v-support
  • glTF™ Ecosystem Grows: Following the successful release of glTF 2.0, the 3D asset transmission format continues to gain strong momentum, including support from Microsoft and Google. Today, Khronos has revealed that Google has released a new extension to use Draco geometry compression to make glTF files significantly more compact, that the Blender Exporter for glTF 2.0 is now complete and in beta, as well as Microsoft continuing to use glTF 2.0 to bring 3D capabilities to Paint 3D and Microsoft office Find out more about glTF updates and extensions here: https://www.khronos.org/blog/gltf-2.0-ecosystem-advancement.
  • Khronos Announces the Vulkan Portability Initiative: To expand the number of platforms that Vulkan can support, Khronos has formed a Vulkan Portability Technical Subgroup within its Vulkan Working Group. This subgroup is tasked with developing specifications, open-source library code and tools, together with conformance tests to define and support the set of Vulkan capabilities that can be made universally available across all major platforms, including those not currently served by Vulkan. The Vulkan Portability Initiative is defining and providing a standardized subset of the familiar Vulkan API that will run universally on all new-generation 3D-enabled platforms, including those that currently support only DirectX and Metal. Find out more information at https://www.khronos.org/blog/khronos-announces-the-vulkan-portability-initiative.
  • Khronos Launches New Website: org has relaunched at Siggraph with expanded functionality to better service members, developers, adopters, and chapters. Visit the new site today: www.khronos.org

The Khronos Group is hosting its annual, full-day BOF Blitz open to the public on August 2 with topics covering OpenVX, NNEF, OpenCL, SYCL, COLLADA, glTF, WebGL, OpenXR, Vulkan, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES. In addition, Khronos will host its annual after-party as well as educational sessions and networking events throughout the week.The full schedule of events is available at: https://www.khronos.org/news/events/2017-siggraph.

About The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, vision and neural nets on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include Vulkan®, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenGL® SC, WebGL™, SPIR-V™, OpenCL™, SYCL™, OpenVX™, NNEF™, COLLADA™, OpenXR™ and glTF™. Khronos members are enabled to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge accelerated platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

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Vulkan is a registered trademark of The Khronos Group. Khronos, OpenXR, DevU, SPIR, SPIR-V, SYCL, WebGL, WebCL, COLLADA, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenVX, EGL, glTF, OpenKCAM, StreamInput, OpenWF, OpenSL ES, NNEF and OpenMAX are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES and OpenGL SC logos are trademarks of Silicon Graphics International used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.