Zink has announced that it now supports OpenGL 4.5 over Vulkan with Mesa 21.1.

Naivi have used the MoltenVK layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal, a part of the Khronos Vulkan Portability Initiative, to port their NAP real-time performance engine from OpenGL to Vulkan to ship on Windows, Linux AND macOS. Naivi discovered that Vulkan apps run just as well on macOS as they do on Linux and Windows, avoiding the need for a dedicated Metal backend. Switching to Vulkan dramatically improved render-times for NAP’s Mac users, as well as providing a significant performance boost on Windows and Linux. The article concludes “Vulkan does feel like the future of graphics.”

xVision has released an update to version 2.00, which brings full compatibility with version 11.51 of X-Plane and the Vulkan API.

The xVision utility enables the user to manipulate shaders and alter the way X-Plane’s visual enhancements appear. Users of xVision 1.X would have noticed that when using the Vulkan API to render visuals, many of the shaders had little to no effect on X-Plane and their experience. With 2.00, xVision now supports shader tweaks for both Vulkan and OpenGL.

Panfrost, the open source driver for Arm Mali Midgard & Bifrost GPUs now provides non-conformant OpenGL ES 3.0 on Bifrost and desktop OpenGL 3.1 on Midgard. Panfrost’s desktop OpenGL support is native, reducing CPU overhead. Applications can now make use of the hardware’s hidden features, like explicit primitive restart indices, alpha testing, and quadrilaterals.

Remograph, providers of products and services for the computer graphics, visual simulation and 3D modeling markets, announced the release of Remo 3D v2.10. Remo 3D is an effective OpenGL-based tool for creating and modifying 3D models intended for realtime visualization. The primary file format is OpenFlight. Remo 3D is currently available for Microsoft Windows 10/8/7 and Linux. This new version 2.10 of Remo 3D brings support for more keyboard shortcuts, improved macro handling, setting of relative external reference paths and other various fixes. The full list of new features and improvements can be found in the release notes on our website.

Microsoft has released a compatibility pack that allows you to run any OpenCL and OpenGL apps on a Windows 10 PC that doesn’t have OpenCL and OpenGL hardware drivers installed by default. If you have a DirectX 12 driver installed on your Windows 10 PC, supported apps will run with hardware acceleration for better performance.

The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer. Learn more here.

Beginning with Mesa 20.2 is OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, the LLVM-based software rasterizer built as a Gallium3D driver. This succeeded LLVMpipe for years being limited to OpenGL 3.3. While the OpenGL 4.5 support has been enabled for weeks, The Khronos Group has now officially confirmed its implementation.

Intel merged a change to benefit Intel’s Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers for making use of the HDC data cache for uniform buffer object (UBO) pulls on Gen12+ hardware, namely Tiger Lake at this point. By making use of the data cache for UBO pulls, there is generally up to another few percent improvements for various OpenGL and Vulkan games running on Linux—either natively or through the likes of the DXVK layer. Some improvements cited in the merge include:

• GTA V DXVK 104.0%
  
• Talos Principle GL 102.8%
  
• Rise of Tomb Raider VK 102.8%
  
• Dark Souls 3 DXVK 101.4%
  
• Witcher3 DXVK 101.3%
  
• Bioshock Infinite GL 100.5%
  
• Doom 2016 VK 97.7%
  

This blog series discusses the port of the game Detroit: Become Human  from PlayStation® 4 to P and is written jointly by Ronan Marchalot, 3D engine director, and 3D engine senior developers Nicolas Vizerie and Jonathan Siret from Quantic Dream, along with Lou Kramer, who is a developer technology engineer from AMD.  The first instalment in this series walks the reader through choosing an API: Already having an OpenGL working version, the choice is between Direct X 12 and Vulkan. Read the post to learn which was chosen.

Atypical Games, with support from Samsung, took on the task of implementing Vulkan support into their engine. In this blog, Razvan Baraitaru, Atypical Games, will share his experiences with porting to Vulkan and then later Calum Shields, Samsung, will discuss some of the issues that cropped up in the Android implementation of “Sky Gamblers: Infinite Jets”. There are numerous reasons for choosing Vulkan. Primarily it creates an opportunity for better performance and compatibility across many of our target platforms - Android, Nintendo Switch and Windows. Also, we had in mind some possible future Stadia games where Vulkan is the only graphics API.

Earlier this year, Collabora announced a new project with Microsoft: the implementation of OpenCL & OpenGL to DirectX translation layers. Here’s the latest on this work, including the steps taken to improve the performance of the OpenGL-On-D3D12 driver.

The new release brings a redesigned geometry pipeline with focus on efficient zero-copy loading of binary assets such as glTF; new OpenGL debugging, visualization and profiling tools, and several WebGL examples including fluid simulation and raytracing.

Google Summer of Code announced their projects last month and on June 1st the programming has begun. Projects this year include OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenXR, SPIR, Vulkan and WebGL. On September 8th, the results of GSoC will be announced.

Connect directly with NVIDIA Developer Technology Engineers on OpenGL and Vulkan-related topics to get answers to all of your questions. Whether you have questions about regular graphics use, compute shaders, ray tracing, or interop between the apis, we’re here to help you with questions around the Khronos graphics apis. Space is limited to 150 people, so don’t wait to sign-up.