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Kathleen Maher from Jon Peddie Research writes “One of the most important technical advances to move technology forward is the development of WebGL, a variation on OpenGL that enables online code to take advantage of hardware processing. With the imminent arrival of WebGL 2.0 — expected by this summer — Peddie and Maher see benefits from hardware acceleration on the horizon.”

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.

Graphics researchers at Samsung Electronics UK have teamed up with mobile graphics specialists Codeplay, Think Silicon and TU Berlin to develop a tool for enabling smartphone batteries to last longer while running advanced video games and using the camera. “Low-power GPU2” (LPGPU2) is a EU-funded research project into low powered graphics devices. It is the work of a specially formed consortium of three companies and one university, all from across the EU, who are collaborating to deliver advances in tools and applications for energy efficient use of mobile GPUs.

Amazon is now accepting pre-orders on the new Vulkan Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning Vulkan. The Vulkan Programming Guide is the essential, authoritative reference to this new standard, for graphics programmers at all levels of experience, in any Vulkan environment, on any platform. The book is written by John Kessenich and Graham Sellers, both Khronos Group members.

There are two Khronos Chapter Meetups tomorrow. WebGL Baristas, Lesson 1 in Amsterdam, and New Graphics APIs discussion panel at the dawn of Vulkan in Paris. There are two more Chapter meetups scheduled in January for next week.

The NVIDIA developer blog has a great article highlighting some of the benefits of Vulkan. A short but worthwhile read for any OpenGL and Vulkan enthusiast. “In this post we want to look at the basic operations that normally happen in a rendering frame and which API mechanisms are used.”

Digital Media Professionals Inc announced that it has licensed the DMP GPU core, SMAPH-F, to Renesas Electronics Corporation, for its SoCs (system-on-chips) for office appliances. The DMP SMAPH-F is 2D Vector graphics IP core which is differentiated by its robust conformance to Khronos Group standards OpenVG and by its remarkably small silicon foot print which enables DMP licensees to maximize graphics performance delivered per square millimeter of silicon area and per mill watt of system power consumption.

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.

If you’re a Star Wars fan and have a computer and a smart phone, give this Chrome Experiment a try. From Engadget, “Lightsaber Escape is a Chrome Experiment that Google made in conjunction with Lucasfilm and Star Wars visual-effects studio Industrial Light & Magic. It uses WebGL for the 3D graphics, plus WebRTC and WebSocket for the real-time communication between your phone and desktop.”

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’.

Mesa 11.0.3–according to the internal release notes–is a major bugfix release that resolves the KDE and Weston regressions that have been introduced in the previous release of the software, Mesa 11.0.2. Additionally, Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.0.3 has a great number of patches for EGL and includes numerous bugfixes, especially for the Intel i830, Intel i915, Intel i965, RadeonSI, and Nouveau graphics drivers, as well as various under-the-hood improvements. “Mesa 11.0.3 is now available. In the current release we have a bunch of EGL patches, mangledGL build fixes and a healthy amount of driver bugfixes - RadeonSI, Nouveau, Intel i915 and i965,” says Emil Velikov, software release engineer for Collabora. “Last but not least, the KDE/Weston regression introduced with 11.0.2 has also been resolved.”

Renesas Electronics Corporation introduced the ADAS Starter Kit based on Renesas’ high-end R-Car H2 System on Chip (SoC) and developed to help simplify and speed the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) applications. The new ADAS Starter Kit is capable of delivering more than 25,000 DMIPS and provides state-of-the-art 3D graphics capabilities and powerful vision processing cores. The R-Car H2 is powered by the ARM Cortex A-15 quad-core configuration running an additional ARM Cortex A-7 quad-core. It also features the Imagination Technologies PowerVR Series6 G6400 GPU which supports both OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL ES 3.0.

Seekscale had a chat with Neil Trevett, Khronos Group President, on the future of Vulkan. There is a lot of energy and effort going into defining Vulkan – it is not a normal, multi-year, standardization effort – it will be completed much faster than that…

The Khronos OpenGL ES working group is soliciting quotes for enhancing and expanding the OpenGL ES Conformance Test Suite. OpenGL ES is an industry-leading, royalty-free 3D graphics API. Any company, whether a Khronos member or not, is cordially invited to contact Khronos and provide a quote. Interested parties can access the details of the request on the Khronos website.