Samsung announced the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge today at the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2016 event at MWC in Barcelona – and that new Samsung phones will natively support the Vulkan API for leading-edge 3D graphics performance. Samsung also demonstrated the ProtoStar demo from Epic Games utilizing Unreal Engine 4 accelerated by the Vulkan API.
ARM shares their experience with developers of porting a graphics engine to the Vulkan API. The engine we decided to port to Vulkan has already had support for various other standard APIs such as OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 3.2.
Qualcomm Incorporated announced that its subsidiary Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. has introduced support for the latest graphics and compute API from Khronos, Vulkan, on its Qualcomm Adreno 530 GPU, which is embedded in its Qualcomm® Snapdragon 820 processor.
The Khronos Group announces the immediate availability of the Vulkan 1.0 royalty-free, open standard API specification. Vulkan provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms. This ground-up design, complementing the OpenGL®and OpenGL ES 3D APIs, provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability with minimized CPU overhead and efficient multi-threaded performance. Multiple Vulkan 1.0 hardware drivers and SDKs are available immediately for developers to begin creating Vulkan applications and engines. More information on Vulkan is available on the Vulkan homepage and in the Vulkan 1.0 press release.
Imagination will demonstrate cutting-edge solutions for next-generation products such as mobile phones, tablets, wearables, IoT, automotive, ultra HD and OTT TV and more. Highlights include the latest demo of the Khronos Vulkan API, highlighting its ideal fit with the Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR) technology in PowerVR GPUs.
Learn more about Vulkan, the new graphics and compute API directly from Khronos, the people who are creating it. In this 1-hour session, we will talk about the API, and go into details about the Vulkan SDK from LunarG, and much more. Register today!
AMD Developer Technology Engineer Matthaeus Chajdas will be hosting a lecture at GDC 2016 on Vulkan. Vulkan and DirectX12 are new, low-level APIs which require developers to think about graphics in a new way. In many cases game engines need to be restructured to take advantage of low-level parallel submission, asynchronous execution and new state & resource handling features provided by the API. In this lecture, these new concepts will be reviewed and we will take a look at how launch titles successfully handled the transition to the new APIs. The presentation will include useful insights gained while developing the first wave of Vulkan & DirectX®12 titles.
Neil Trevett delivers the presentation, “Update on Khronos Open Standard APIs for Vision Processing,” at the December 2015 Embedded Vision Alliance Member Meeting. Neil provides an update on recent developments in multiple Khronos standards useful for vision applications.
Most flows use EGL to facilitate the sharing of objects between multiple client APIs, requiring the Khronos extension CL_KHR_EGL_IMAGE. The examples in this PowerVR Imaging Framework installment from Imagination Technologies show the different zero-copy flows supported.
Imagination Technologies introduces another installment in their Vulkan series. In this post Tobias will be doing some analysis of why and how Vulkan is an explicit API, and what exactly that means. There is a lot of mention of Vulkan being a low-level API, and in some ways that’s true, but a lot of work is still abstracted from developers to handle cross-vendor compatibility.
Imagination Technologies webinar series part II on Vulkan is now online. Vulkan is designed from the ground up with the idea of not being bottlenecked by the CPU, and provides huge efficiency gains over previous generation graphics APIs in this area. This webinar provides an overview of what mechanisms in Vulkan enable this, what this means in practice, and why it is so important for embedded and mobile devices. The episode was presented by Tobias Hector, Software Design Engineer for Vulkan and OpenGL ES, Imagination Technologies. Be sure to add November 19th to your calendar as the webinar series continues with ‘Scaling to multiple threads’.
The Brenwill Workshop Ltd. announced that they have added support for OS X to their MetalGL product, which seamlessly brings the performance of Metal to OpenGL ES games and applications on iOS, and now OS X. MetalGL is an implementation of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that runs on Apple’s Metal graphics framework on compatible iOS and OS X devices. MetalGL unleashes the power of Metal’s low-latency rendering to let OpenGL ES games and applications perform up to 3x the number of draw calls, and benefit from the advanced tools available for the Metal development ecosystem, all without changing the way the game or app use OpenGL ES.
Vulkan is able to cover a wide range of platforms and hardware with vastly different form factors and power envelopes. Vulkan can run on a smart watch or a high end workstation, or anything in between. These platforms are going to have completely different capabilities and for good reason – they have different use cases in mind. Read more to understand how Vulkan has been designed to support all platforms.
Vivante Corporation announces the immediate availability of the VIP7000 family of Vision Image Processor IP cores. The VIP7000 has been designed into a range of products from a mass market IoT surveillance client SoC to an automotive imaging application. Vivante’s VIP family was one of the first to pass the OpenVX conformance test. The industry is rapidly adopting OpenVX as a standard API for vision programming. OpenVX and OpenCL are important API standards helping to expand the computer vision ecosystem and are a key component in the VIP product family.
This Vulkan demo from Intel shows the power and performance improvements resulting from a thinner, better optimized 3D API. Vulkan API is on track for release before the end of this year.
