Vulkan 1.0.53 does have a number of document clarifications and fixes, but most exciting is a handful of new extensions. The new ones to Vulkan 1.0.53 are VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, VK_EXT_blend_operation_advanced, VK_EXT_sampler_filter_minmax, and VK_NV_framebuffer_mixed_samples. Read more about this update from Phoronix, or hop on over to the Vulkan Change Log for more details on this update.
AMD’s GPUOpen initiative has posted a number of Vulkan open-source projects over time, with their latest open-source project is a Vulkan Memory Allocator. The VulkanMemoryAllocator is designed as a “easy to integrate Vulkan memory allocation library.” Learn more about this project on Phoronix.
PasVulkan is a serious effort about bringing Vulkan to Object Pascal. PasVulkan is a Vulkan header generator and object-oriented style API wrapper for the Object Pascal programming language. This works with both FreePascal and the Delphi compiler.
As mentioned on Phoronix, Google just announced GSoC 2017 Projects. Included in the list are several Khronos related projects:
• Software Renderer for Vulkan (Vulkan, SPIR-V)
• 3D Hardware Acceleration in Haiku (OpenGL)
• Cross Platform GUI for CCExtractor (OpenGL
• libosmscout: Implementation of an opengl renderer (OpenGL)
• OpenGL-accelerated Renderer for Cytoscape 3 (OpenGL)
• Improvement to WebGL core for p5.js (WebGL)
• Project Proposal-Javascript/WebGL Library For Interactive Visualization Of Large-Scale Network Graphs. (WebGL)
• WebGL improvements for p5.js (WebGL)
• Creating the fastest math libraries for Ruby by using the GPU through OpenCL and ArrayFire. (OpenCL)
• GPU Boolean Evaluation for CSG Ray-Tracing (OpenCL)
• HPXCL – Asynchronous Integration of CUDA and OpenCL to HPX (OpenCL)
• libxcam Enable a debluring feature with OpenCL Design (OpenCL)
• Speeding up functional network analysis on fMRI data with distributed, in-memory computation using Apache Spark (OpenCL)
Unigine Corp has publicly confirmed that they expect to have Vulkan support later this year, “Vulkan support is in the roadmap for the engine this year.” Read the complete story.
Phoronix posted about the newly revised OpenCL.org website: “The folks behind StreamComputing BV are looking to strengthen the OpenCL compute ecosystem by improving the documentation and code samples as well as better overviews for those wishing to learn this Khronos compute standard.” Learn more about OpenCL.org on Phoronix or on StreamComputing.
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.