Khronos introduces Vulkan Hpp, an open source Vulkan C++ API. Vulkan is a C API and as such inherits all common pitfalls of using a general C programming library. The motivation of a low-level Vulkan C++ API is to avoid these common pitfalls by applying commonly known C++ features while keeping the overall structure of a Vulkan program and preserving the full freedom it provides as low-level graphics API.

Khronos sponsored a day long course covering both the function-based API and the graph API that enable OpenVX developers to efficiently run computer vision algorithms on heterogeneous computing architectures. One section explains the tutorial exercises with a VirtualBox VM, which can be downloaded from the tutorial on Github. The Embedded Vision Summit schedule is located here, the tutorial is on Github and the associated videos from the day long tutorial are available on Youtube.

Valve pushed out an update that provides opt-in support for using the Vulkan graphics API of the Source 2 Engine rather than using OpenGL (or DirectX under Windows). Those interested in trying out Vulkan on Dota 2 can enable the Dota 2 Vulkan DLC and launch the game with the -vulkan switch. More details here and in the official Dota 2 announcement.

A two hours-long talk at University of Lodz in Poland discussed the most common mistakes we come across in Vulkan applications. Dominik Witczak, one of AMDs developers, started from presenting exactly where Vulkan fits in the vast ecosystem of 3D APIs, and who Vulkan generally is, and is not, targeted for. After this short introduction, he proceeded with shedding more light on various areas of the API we find Vulkan application developers are having trouble with. Slides are available online.

NVIDIA has made available its 364.91 beta Vulkan GeForce graphics driver, which updates Vulkan API to 1.0.8, improves pipeline creation performance and multi-threaded scaling, and fixes minor driver and SPIR-V compiler bugs.

The GStreamer 1.8 open-source multimedia framework has been released today, March 24, 2016, after several months of hard work, and it appears to be a major release with dozens of new features. According to the release notes, GStreamer 1.8 adds initial support for the new Vulkan 1.0 API.

There will be a Vulkan Keynote at Laval Virtual March 24 2016 in Laval France. Tristan Lorach will present “From OpenGL to Vulkan: looking for optimal graphic performances”. The conference will explore the constituent elements of the new Vulkan API and explain why it was created.

Khronos Safety Critical Working Group Chair Erik Noreke recently spoke at the 4th annual Scandinavian Conference on System and Software Safety (SCSSS). The slides from the presentation are now online.

AMD has released a highly optimized open source implementation of the Khronos OpenVX computer vision specification for x86 CPUs and GPUs using OpenCL. The release also includes an open source “graph optimizer” that inspects an OpenVX graph and removes/replaces/merges functions to improve performance and minimize bandwidth. Scripting tools enable rapid prototyping and enables calling any OpenCV functions from within an OpenVX application

The LWJGL project is hosting Vulkan bindings for the Java programming language. There is support now through their nightly builds on Windows and Linux. This Vulkan support in LWJGL complements the project’s many other Khronos API binding support including OpenGL, OpenGL ES, EGL and OpenCL.

Folks from RenderDoc have written an introductory ‘Vulkan in 30 minutes’ post with a specific target audience in mind, namely those who have a good grounding in existing APIs (e.g. D3D11 and OpenGL) and understand the concepts of multithreading, staging resources, synchronisation and so on but want to know specifically how they are implemented in Vulkan. Take a moment to read this whirlwind tour of what the main Vulkan concepts look like.

Unreal Engine 4’s implementation of Vulkan API enables developers to create visually stunning, cross-platform 3D content that supports more draw calls, and more dynamic objects onscreen, with faster performance than ever before. Watch here to see how it all came together through the making of ProtoStar, revealed at Mobile World Congress 2016.

NVIDIA is rolling out the world’s first production Vulkan drivers today as part of the Android 6.0 Marshmallow OTA update to SHIELD Android TV. This makes SHIELD Android TV the first consumer platform with production installed Vulkan drivers – making it an ideal platform for Android developers to get easy access to this new-generation graphics API This continues NVIDIA’s rollout of Vulkan drivers across multiple platforms, including Windows 7-10, desktop and embedded Linux and now Android.

Learn more about this newly-launched graphics and compute API directly from Khronos, the people who created it. In this 1-hour session, we will talk about the API, and also go into details about the Vulkan SDK from LunarG, and much more. We’ll of course end with a Q&A session. This webinar is directed to Asia and the surrounding area. Presentation and Q&A conducted in English. Register today!

At the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2016 event at MWC in Barcelona, Epic Games announced that Unreal Engine 4 supports the Vulkan API and Samsung mentions Vulkan (video). Samsung showed the ProtoStar real-time 3D experience built with Unreal Engine 4 technology utilizing the Vulkan API, running on the new Samsung Galaxy S7. “Anytime we can converge on an idea, particularly an idea like Vulkan, which is made by the industry, is asked for by the industry, everybody gets stronger.” Wyeth Johnson, Lead Technical Artist, Epic Games. Get Unreal, the first engine to support Vulkan.