Google acquired and open-sourced GraphicsFuzz a little over a year ago. GraphicsFuzz is no longer about only OpenGL, OpenGL ES and GLSL shaders but also operates on SPIR-V shaders for consumption by Vulkan drivers. There are also GLSL/SPIR-V shader reducers in addition to the fuzzer that relies upon randomized metamorphic testing.
At GTC CHINA – taking place December 16-19 at Suzhou Jinji Lake International Conference Center – Henrik Li from NVIDIA, and Ming Dong from Kingsoft, will explain how JX3 Online is using ray tracing for the first time to deliver a top-tier visual experience. In advance of their GTC China talk, NVIDIA talked to Kingsoft Seasun about the project. In connection to Vulkan, NVIDIA asked “JX3 is the first Vulkan game to support ray tracing. Why did your team decide to make this graphical jump?” Kingsoft said they hope to implement cross-platform through Vulkan, and at the same time, they can do ray tracing development on Vulkan. Read the complete transcript from the interview here.
VMA (Vulkan Memory Allocator) is the GPUOpen single-header, MIT-licensed, C++ library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for Vulkan games and applications. One year after the previous release, a new version is being published. You can get it now by going to VulkanMemoryAllocator Releases on GitHub and grabbing the latest v2.3.0.
We are just one week away from Halo: Reach coming to PC after a lengthy stint as an Xbox exclusive title. In preparation for the big release, NVIDIA has begun rolling out the Game Ready driver with optimisations. In addition, Quake II RTX has had an upgrade to further improve the ray-traced remaster. This latest driver also brings Image Sharpening support for OpenGL and Vulkan games. (Source: Kitguru.net)
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.
