A transcoded version of the API sample Terrain Tessellation that illustrates the usage of the C++ bindings of vulkan provided by vulkan.hpp. View Sample
A transcoded version of the API sample Compute N-Body that illustrates the usage of the C++ bindings of vulkan provided by vulkan.hpp. View Sample
Imagination Technologies and The Khronos Group are holding the Khronos and Imagination Seminar in Shanghai, a developer event highlighting the rapidly evolving software-hardware ecosystem and the opportunities for GPU technology, open-source standards and open API interfaces across mobile gaming, automotive and cloud. Watch the Khronos and Imagination Seminar on-demand sessions and find out more about the PowerVR SDK. Learn more about Imagination Technologies and the Khronos Group.
London, England – 19th July 2022 – Imagination Technologies and The Khronos® Group are holding the Khronos and Imagination Seminar in Shanghai, a developer event highlighting the rapidly evolving software-hardware ecosystem and the opportunities for GPU technology, open-source standards and open API interfaces across mobile gaming, automotive and cloud. Watch the Khronos and Imagination Seminar on-demand sessions and find out more about the PowerVR SDK.
Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett, shares how open standards have an important role mitigating the complexities of safety-critical certification in a confusing landscape of processors, accelerators, compilers, APIs, and libraries, that drive up integration costs for embedded accelerators, which in turn has constrained innovation and time-to-market efficiencies.
The Vulkan SDK components come from open-source repositories. While it is feasible to develop Vulkan applications without using the Vulkan SDK,
there are many benefits to installing it. Check out LunarG’s white paper that shares the many benefits.
NVIDIA presents Vulkan-specific tips that are not necessarily explicitly covered by the other Advanced API Performance posts. In addition to introducing new Vulkan 1.3 core features, this post shares a set of good practices for clearing and presenting surfaces.
In this new blog post by Collabora, Manas Chaudhary guides us through the process of adding secondary command buffers to PanVK, the open source Vulkan driver.
The Vulkan Portability Technical Subgroup is seeking to reduce the number of CTS failures in MoltenVK under Vulkan 1.0 with no extensions. MoltenVK provides Vulkan functionality layered on top of the Metal graphics API on Apple devices. All RFP responses are due by 5p.m. PDT on Friday, June 24, 2022.
Three new Vulkan samples have been released in the past month:
HPP Instancing Sample - NVIDIA provides a transcoded Instancing Sample that illustrates the usage of the C++ bindings.
Portability Sample - Holochip presents a tutorial demonstrating the use of the VK_KHR_portability_subset extension.
Graphics Pipeline Libraries - Sascha Williams brings us this tutorial on the VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library extensions that allows separate compilation of different parts of the graphics pipeline. With this it’s now possible to split up the monolithic pipeline creation into different steps and re-use common parts shared across different pipelines.
At the recent GTC 2022 Conference NVIDIA released multiple initiatives to boost the productivity of Vulkan developers. The new NVIDIA Nsight Systems 2022.2 system-wide performance analysis tool supports the new Vulkan graphics pipeline library extension and Vulkan memory operations. NVIDIA’s new Streamline open-source, cross-IHV framework can be used to integrate multiple super-resolution technologies into Vulkan games and applications. And lastly, NVIDIA’s new Cloud Playtest virtual development environment that builds on GeForce NOW infrastructure enables the coordination and observation of playtests for Vulkan games without physical hardware or presence.
GPU Performance API (GPUPerfAPI) is a powerful library providing access to GPU Performance Counters to help analyze the performance and characteristics of applications using a Radeon GPU.
GPUPerfAPI v3.11 adds support for raytracing counters in Vulkan on RDNA2 (Radeon RX 6000 Series) hardware:
RayTriTests, and RayBoxTests: These counters collect the number of ray intersections for triangles and boxes, respectively.
TotalRayTests: This counter collects the aggregated number of ray-box and ray-triangle intersection tests.
RayTestsPerWave: This counter collects ray intersection test count at a more granular level – per wave.
Join us to help drive the evolution of Machine Learning acceleration standards. ML developers lament the growing fragmentation in the ML ecosystem. Khronos knows that open and royalty-free standards can play an essential role in reducing fragmentation, reducing costs, and providing the industry participants the opportunity to grow. Based on feedback from previous summit and discussions, Khronos is creating a coalition of interested parties to meet the needs of the ML community for hardware acceleration.
Vulkan Portability aims to counter platform fragmentation by encouraging layered implementations of Vulkan functionality over Metal, DX12, and other APIs. Vulkan Portability enables Vulkan applications to be reliably deployed across diverse platforms.
Khronos released a provisional version of Vulkan Portability Extension 1.0 in September 2020. The VK_KHR_portability_subset extension allows a non-conformant Vulkan implementation to be built on top of another non-Vulkan graphics API and identifies the difference between that implementation and a fully-conformant native Vulkan implementation. The extension is detailed in the Vulkan Specification.
For already released applications that are expecting to see only fully Vulkan conformant devices, a backward-compatibility issue exists. To solve the backward-compatibility issue, Khronos has released the new Vulkan Loader extension, VK_KHR_portability_enumeration. The purpose of this extension is to enable or disable enumeration of portability (non-conformant) implementations.
Khronos has introduced a new extension named VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library that allows for shaders to be compiled much earlier than at full Pipeline State Object (PSO) creation time. By leveraging this extension, I was able to avoid many causes of frame hitches due to PSOs being late-created at draw time in the Source 2 Vulkan renderer. The extension spec was released today and SDK support will follow soon.
