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:
World War Z – Using Vulkan to Tame the Zombie Swarm – Video & Slides
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.
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.
RenderDoc 1.5 has been released. Changes include: SPIR-V reflection and disassembly has been refactored to be more reliable and is based on the publicly available grammar json; Vulkan has a new replay-time optimisation which takes advantage of the above replay options dialog; OpenGL has a low-memory optimisation to defer copying initial contents of textures and buffers that are rarely modified; Support for twenty-one (21) Vulkan extensions have been added; Support for fifteen (15) OpenGL extensions have been added along with whitelisting of some OpenGL ES extensions that were already supported. A complete list of changes and improvements is available in the Latest release notes.
