In this Collabora blog post, Rohan Garg explores the new, low overhead extension in Mesa allowing OpenGL and Vulkan applications to talk to each other, bringing more flexibility to application developers while easing the transition path between the industry-standard Khronos APIs.
In this featured blog by Autodesk’s Jerran Schmidt, we explore the use of scalable cloud resources to process data from large datasets and why Autodesk chose Vulkan as their API.
Simulating the sensor modalities used in automated driving efficiently and accurately is an immense challenge. The best solutions is to rely on GPU-accelerated raytracing techniques and the efficient distribution of tasks. Today, the Vulkan API is the only tool that can support such a system – that’s why we’ve integrated it into aiSim.
AMD’s open-source Vulkan driver’s newest release includes a CPU performance optimizations for its Vulkan pipeline binning and faster shader compilation times. The sources to this updated AMDVLK 2021.Q2.3 driver along with RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu binaries can be found available for download at GitHub.
By Kristofer Rose - Developer Relations, The Khronos Group
It has been a while in the making but we are very excited to launch the new Vulkan website to the community. Don’t worry, Vulkan is still maintained and owned by The Khronos Group; we just felt that it had outgrown its old website now that it has been five years since the Vulkan 1.0 launch.
The original Vulkan website was designed for the launch of a cutting edge new API that would, initially, have limited official materials and community content. The old website performed that role admirably, but Vulkan has come a long way and we now have a large and increasing amount of tools, libraries, educational material, and news to showcase that a single page website cannot handle. The new website allows us to gather all these currently disparate internal and community resources in a single, easily navigable place.
Our primary goal with the new vulkan.org site was to place key resources prominently to allow developers to quickly and easily find what they need. With this in mind, each page has buttons in the banner leading straight to the most essential and popular resources. If you need the Vulkan Specification, SDK or Guide you can just jump straight there, no digging needed.
The new site has a whole page dedicated to Vulkan tools and support , giving developers access to SDKs, profilers, debuggers, libraries, language bindings, game engines and frameworks all easy to navigate to through a series of quick buttons. This is a huge improvement and it let’s developers discover new tools or quickly find their go to favorites.
Vulkan is enjoying a boom in adoption by world class developers and we want to make sure we are showcasing this exciting content to our visitors. As such you’ll notice much more prominent use of imagery across the site that will be updated as time goes on and new content is available. There is also now a dedicated “Made with Vulkan” showcase which is a living list of Vulkan content and reveals just how powerful and versatile the API is. If you have a Vulkan project that you would like to let us know about, please use the linked form on the Made with Vulkan page above the showcase.
We hope this website becomes a new focal point for the Vulkan community and improves the Vulkan development experience for both new and experienced developers.
LunarG has released a new Windows, Linux, and macOS Software Development Kits (SDKs) for Vulkan header 1.2.176. These SDKs include support for many new extensions, including provisional Video. The prior SDK supported Vulkan API revision 1.2.170. Read on for information about the new extensions.
The Khronos Group and VeriSilicon are holding a joint Technical Tutorial and Workshop in Shanghai on April 22 & 23rd. The first day will be a virtual event and will include an overview of the Khronos Group and then deep dive into Vulkan and Vulkan Ray Tracing. On day 2, which will be onsite in Shanghai, the workshop will focus on OpenXR and parallel processing, vision acceleration and inferencing. Be sure to check out the event’s page for more information and register.
Khronos is releasing a set of Provisional Vulkan Video acceleration extensions : ‘Vulkan Video’. This blog will give you an overview of Vulkan’s new video processing capabilities and we welcome feedback before the extensions are finalized so that they may provide effective acceleration for your video applications! Learn more about this new Vulkan Video provisional release.
Join us online at the 9th International Workshop on OpenCL, including SYCLcon 2021, for four days of talks April 26-29,2021. There will be 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 provides a rich mix of hands-on tutorials, technical presentations, research papers, posters, panel discussions, networking and vendor discussions. It also provides a formal channel for community feedback to the Khronos Group, the industry body responsible for the standards.
The newest release of Radeon GPU Profiler, a ground-breaking low-level optimization tool for Radeon GPUs, introduces Vulkan ray tracing support along with GPU cache counters and the latest RDNA 2 GPUs.
Intel’s open-source “ANV” Vulkan driver now supports the Vulkan ext_conservative_rasterization extension. The conservative rasterization mode allows for over or under estimation for limiting the rasterization process and ensuring certainty over the rendering behavior. The extension is supported by Intel’s Mesa Vulkan driver in Git ahead of Mesa 21.1.
Click thru for a preview of the Panfrost driver with enough functions implemented to run vkcube. This is an early preview and the driver lacks almost all core features, no optimizations, and the code base is likely to evolve quickly as features/optimizations are added. In addition, find out how to get involved in implementing functionalities.
AImotive announced that it has integrated Vulkan Ray Tracing into its aiSim 3.0, the ISO26262 certified, automotive-grade open simulator tool for automated driving development. Vulkan Ray Tracing’s real-time rendering technology is particularly well suited to simulation environments, making it possible to utilize Vulkan capabilities for professional automotive applications alongside gaming.
Synchronization is a critical but often misunderstood part of the Vulkan API. The new VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension includes several improvements to make Vulkan Synchronization easier to use, without major changes to the fundamental concepts described in this new blog. We highlight key differences introduced with Synchronization2 throughout the blog.
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) recently introduced Vulkan Ray Tracing into their Helios real-time renderer. StageCraft and the Helios renderer are entirely new toolsets that allow for assets of final VFX level quality to be displayed on the LED walls without requiring as much manual optimization while allowing a high degree of reconfigurability “live on the day”. ILM’s Helios real-time renderer is able to handle extreme scene complexity, with millions and millions of polygons to enable assets of final VFX level quality to be displayed on the LED walls of a film studio in real time during filming.