Radeon ProRender enables physically-based GPU rendering through OpenCL. Now with our Full Spectrum Rendering modes, it also brings Vulkan-based ray tracing to Windows and Linux users. This allows the user to set the quality level to a wide spectrum from rasterized to fully path-traced (in OpenCL) render quality, enabling everything from fast viewport previews to accurate final renders.
From the 2019 Reboot Develop Red conference, the complete set of Khronos track talks are now online. Thank you to the Khronos members and developer community for all of your help! We had an excellent line-up of talks:
The developers of the Flax Engine announce that Linux support with Vulkan is coming. This includes high-performant Vulkan rendering and high-DPI monitor support.
Game developers can deploy their games to support desktop gaming on Linux or use special build options to run a game in the cloud for multiplayer and streaming purposes.
Codeplay Software announces Acoran, the standards based platform for AI programmers. Acoran is compatible with Khronos compute standards and Intel’s oneAPI platform, enabling AI processor solutions to align with application developers by taking advantage of established standards and libraries. Codeplay has developed the Acoran platform based on the most relevant and preferred standards, with a comprehensive set of libraries that give AI developers an assured feature set for their applications. With strong momentum in Khronos standards in the industry, SYCL, OpenCL and Vulkan are at the core of the platform, with further support that includes these open source projects.
The Vulkan Working Group has just released the VK_KHR_performance_query extension, which provides a cross-vendor common mechanism to expose performance metrics. These may be used to obtain data from a Vulkan device, typically a graphics card or SoC, to measure the workload demand and assess the impact of application modifications and optimizations.
A new blog by Attilio Provenzano from Arm explores a few of the options available to improve both descriptor and buffer management. The underlying issue of descriptor management is intertwined with that of buffer management, which is choosing how to pack data in VkBuffer objects. Some of the approaches presented in this blog are also covered in greater detail in “Writing and efficient Vulkan renderer” by Arseny Kapoulkine from “GPU Zen 2: Advanced Rendering Techniques”, along with some more options. Samsung also covered descriptor set caching in a presentation at GDC 2019 where they are bringing Fortnite to mobile platforms. You are encouraged to check out the project on Vulkan Mobile Best Practice GitHub page and try the sample for yourself. The tutorials have just been donated to The Khronos Group.
Ogre developer Matias Goldberg announced that, yes, they are working on support for Vulkan. Currently very little running with Vulkan, however, Matias’ blog post does a good job of outlining some of the learning experiences he’s had to go through, and he gives a shout out to the new Vulkan Samples repository.
AMD latest release of Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver – 19.11.1 – was released on 4th November 2019. It comes packed with several useful Vulkan® extensions: VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore, VK_KHR_shader_clock, VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties, VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types, VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control, enabled Clustered Subgroup Operations and VK_KHR_spirv_1_4. Learn more about this update.
LunarG released new SDKs for Vulkan 1.1.126 that include the most recent extensions and maintenance updates. This version has improved validation layer coverage and bug fixes along with the addition of the following extensions: VK_KHR_spirv_1_4, VK_KHR_shader_clock, VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore, VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types, VK_GOOGLE_user_type, VK_IMG_format_pvrtc and VK_KHR_pipeline_executable_properties. For more detailed information, go to Vulkan SDK Download site.
The folks behind Godot, the free and open-source (MIT license) game development engine and toolset, have released Vulkan progress report #5. Some of the bigger changes this month will include: real-time lighting thanks to a clever voxel lighting implementation using signed distance fields; GIProbe now supports multiple bounce lighting (3 bounces), and generates voxel ambient occlusion with options to tweak it manually and Dynamic Objections may be added to a scene and can emit their own light.
Today, The Khronos Group releases the Vulkan Unified Samples Repository, a new central location where anyone can access Khronos-reviewed, high-quality Vulkan code samples in order to make development easier and more streamlined for all abilities. Khronos and its members, in collaboration with external contributors, created the Vulkan Unified Samples Project in response to user demand for more accessible resources and best practices for developing with Vulkan.
Collabora developer Erik Faye-Lund recently went to XDC 2019, where he gave a talk about Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan) (slides). Erik has written an update on the latest developments around Zink, including upstreaming for OpenGL ES, merging in Vulkan and testing on CI.
NVIDIA has released the GeForce 440.97 WHQL driver. According to release notes, the driver adds support for windowed G-SYNC for OpenGL and Vulkan-based applications. Additional fixes can be found on the Dark Side of Gaming website.
A blog from one of the software engineers working on X-Plane has announced that the next major patch X-Plane 11.50 will feature Vulkan and Metal support. A Vulkan build of X-Plane was shown live at Cosford last week. When X-Plane 11.50 Beta releases later this year, add-ons doing supported things, like 2-d panel drawing and UI should just work in Vulkan and Metal. The beta for Vulkan is expected to be relatively long. Get all the details on this X-Plane developers blog.
The 8th International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL) including SYCLcon 2020 has been announced. Join like minded developers for three days of talks, workshops and community networking aimed at furthering the collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst the international community of high-performance computing specialist working with OpenCL, SYCL, SPIR and Vulkan Compute. The event will include a mix of hands-on tutorials, technical presentations, research papers, posters, panel discussions, networking and vendor discussions.