With Blender 2.79, OpenCL support has improved and should be closer to parity with Blender’s CUDA capabilities. The OpenCL Cycles renderer has shorter render times by up to 50% in some cases, tiles are now seen updating while rendering, support for SSS and volume rendering, optimized transparent shadows, and various fixes.
The Portable Computing Language (POCL) has issued a new release of their open-source CPU-based OpenCL implementation. This new version of POCL continues relying upon LLVM and with this release adds support for LLVM/Clang 4.0 and 3.9.
ARM has open-sourced a new compute library with GPU support via OpenCL as well as CPU support with NEON usage. The ARM Compute Library works on both Linux and Android. Source: Phoronix.
Google’s Chrome / Chromium web-browser has added a native glTF 1.0 parser. There are glTF utility libraries in JavaScript and other web-focused languages, but Google adding a native glTF 1.0 parser appears to be related to their VR push with supporting VR content on the web.
At Linaro Connect 17 this past week in Budapest, Vulkan was talked about at the ARM’s Mali graphics drivers session, as well as the lack of current open-source drivers due to lack of customer demand.
Phoronix had a call with The Khronos Group president Neil Trevett to discuss some of their latest initiatives and the ongoing advancements to the Vulkan API, WebGL, SPIR-V, and more. Read about some of the highlights.
One year ago on February 16th, Vulkan was brought into our world. Khronos would like to thank the community for helping to make Vulkan what it is today.
Learn more about Vulkan today
Croteam has also released an update to The Talos Principle that includes improvements to its Vulkan renderer that was previously available as beta.
Phoronix has published benchmarks of 13 Kepler/Maxwell/Pascal NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards when testing Blender 2.78’s OpenCL renderer. Unfortunately, no AMD OpenCL benchmarks for Blender yet—the current open-source stack doesn’t work until ROCm OpenCL support comes into play and the AMDGPU-PRO stack wasn’t working for Blender OpenCL but was falling back to CPU rendering. Read the complete article.
The LibRetro crew is now working on a Vulkan renderer for a PlayStation One emulator. They have a Vulkan renderer working for the Beetle PSX, but the code hasn’t been published yet. In the past few days the LibRetro crew uploaded some YouTube videos showing the Vulkan-renderered PlayStation One emulator in action.
Fresh OpenGL vs Vulkan graphics API performance numbers on the Intel side with their Mesa “ANV” driver.
With the very latest open-source Chromium web-browser development code, WebGL 2.0 support is now being turned on by default for desktop (non-Android) builds.
Intel’s open-source Beignet project for OpenCL support on Intel graphics hardware has landed a bunch of OpenCL 2.0 enablement work.
Fresh OpenCL compute benchmarks of 11 different GPUs when using the latest NVIDIA (370.28) and AMDGPU-PRO (16.30.3) Linux drivers on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The open-source (Clover-based stack) wasn’t used for any open-source AMD OpenCL testing due to its less than stellar state.
Phoronix benchmarking offers an initial look at the OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan Linux performance plus some thermal numbers for the GTX 1050 Mini. A follow-up article will include power consumption / performance-per-Watt metrics of the GTX 1050 / GTX 950 / GTX 750 / GTX 650 for a fun comparison of Pascal, Maxwell, and Kepler of these low/mid-range cards.