Microsoft has released OpenXR for Windows Mixed Reality app on the Microsoft Store. Windows Mixed reality users will now be able to run OpenXR-based applications just by installing the app from the Store. OpenXR lets you write code once that’s then portable across a wide range of hardware platforms — write once and run anywhere!

Back in March 2019 it was announced that Xplane Plane-Maker and Airfoil Maker ran in Vulkan on Mac, Windows and Linux with both NVIDIA and AMD drivers. Since that initial update, it has been announced that the full sim now runs natively on Vulkan. Flying with Vulkan is now possible on AMD, NVidia, and Intel drivers. VR is currently not support on Vulkan, but it’s coming!

NVIDIA Tech Blog: Learn more about machine learning acceleration in Vulkan with cooperative matrices by NVIDIA experts. If the Cooperative Matrix Vulkan extension is interesting to you, you can try it out right now! It is shipping for Turing-based GPUs in NVIDIA driver versions 419.09 (Windows) and 418.31.03 (Linux). Links to all the relevant specifications are here.

This Rust crate by @gwihlidal, a Senior Rendering Engineer II at Electronic Arts (EA), provides an FFI layer and idiomatic rust wrappers for the AMD Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) C/C++ library. Designed to help game developers to manage memory allocations and resource creation by offering some higher-level functions. vk-mem is Cross-platform: Windows, Linux and macOS (MoltenVK).

In a recent update, Diligent Engine now gives applications direct control of state transitions in Vulkan API and DirectX12. Diligent Engine includes support for Vulkan and OpenGL 4.2 on Win32 and Linux, as well as OpenGL ES 3.0 on iOS and OpenGL 4.1 on macOS.

Artifact is now available with launch-day support for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Artifact is a competitive digital card game. The game is targeting Dota 2 players as well as card gaming enthusiasts. Vulkan support on macOS is done through MoltenVK.

Intel’s driver team has published a new graphics driver for all recent GPUs (Intel 6th, 7th and 8th Gen processors) on Windows 10. This driver version exposes Vulkan 1.1.82, and continues to support OpenGL 4.5, exposing the same OpenGL support as v4944 (245 OpenGL extensions). Direct download from Intel is here.

Valve released the Beta of a new and improved version of Steam Play to all Linux users. The Beta version includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles. Windows games with no Linux version currently available can now be installed and run directly from the Linux Steam client, complete with native Steamworks and OpenVR support. DirectX 11 and 12 implementations are now based on Vulkan, resulting in improved game compatibility and reduced performance impact. There are a lot of details in this announcement, be sure to read the entry over on the Steam Community website.

LunarG has released new Vulkan SDKs for Windows, Linux, and macOS based on the 1.1.82 header. Read on for an overview of new features in the release and links to the release notes and the SDKs.

Please read the Release Notes for Linux, Release Notes for Windows, or Release Notes for macOS for additional information or go to LunarXchange to download this new SDK.

LunarG has released new Vulkan SDKs for Windows, Linux, and macOS based on the 1.1.77 header. Changes and additions to Vulkan SDK 1.1.77 include: Linux SDK is now packaged as a tar.gz file instead of a .run file; Many bug fixes, increased validation coverage and accuracy improvements, and feature additions and new extensions for this SDK release: VK_KHR_get_display_properties2 and
VK_KHR_draw_indirect_count.

GL-Z is an OpenGL and Vulkan information utility for Windows, Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi and Tinker Board. GL-Z 0.4.0, based on GeeXLab, has been released with the following new features: OpenGL memory usage for GeForce and Radeon GPUs on Windows and Linux; Vulkan API information for each Vulkan-capable device and more.

Radeon ProRender is a powerful physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images. Built on efficient, high-performance Radeon Rays technology, Radeon ProRender’s complete, scalable ray tracing engine uses open industry standards to harness GPU and CPU performance for swift, impressive results. One of those open industry standards is OpenCL 1.2. AMD’s requirements state: “Hardware agnostic – if your computer can run OpenCL 1.2, it can run Radeon ProRender.” Download the Windows or Linux version directly or learn more about Radeon Pro.

The LunarG Vulkan software development kit (SDK) provides the development and runtime components required to build, run, and debug Vulkan applications. Developers can download the LunarG Vulkan SDK from the LunarXchange website. This blog post will discuss security as it relates to the Vulkan Runtime and Loader on Windows OS.

Microsoft Story Remix has the ability to combine multiple elements, including mixed-reality content from Microsoft’s 3D assets site, 3D Remix. 3D Remix works with third-party content in the glTF interchange format to create eye-popping, special-effects-driven stories. Checkout Remix 3D Preview with glTF online today.

At GDC 2017, in San Francisco during February, Khronos™ released several new Vulkan® extensions for cross-platform Virtual Reality rendering and multiple GPU access. This functionality has been initially released as KHX extensions to enable feedback from the developer community before being incorporated into final specifications. One key question that we have been asked since GDC is whether the Vulkan multi-GPU functionality is specifically tied to ship only on Windows 10.