Khronos Blog

Beat Saber is one of the world’s most popular VR games, with over 6 million users across a wide array of platforms. We want the experience of slashing through blocks with a laser sword to rock, no matter what hardware or platform players use. In pursuit of a more consistent, maintainable cross-platform experience, we recently merged our Beat Saber's PC implementation using Steam VR and Oculus VR by porting to OpenXR. The result was a clean

Vulkan® SC is a streamlined API based on the Khronos® Vulkan API that enables state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in safety-critical systems. On September 27, 2023, the Vulkan SC Working Group at Khronos released the latest Vulkan SC 1.0.13 maintenance update. Alongside the new specification there are significant Vulkan SC tooling updates and streamlined ecosystem synergy with mainstream Vulkan. R

Attendees at the Khronos Fast Forward Birds of a Feather Session at SIGGRAPH 2023 At SIGGRAPH 2023, Khronos hosted a series of packed-house Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions exploring the latest updates and future developments for glTF, the open-standard 3D format that allows content creators to build an asset once and use it everywhere. Standing-room-only gatherings of content creators, platform providers and tool vendors discussed new glTF cap

The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension, allowing copies to and from images to be done on the host rather than the device. Vulkan already provides functions to copy between buffers and images through vkCmdCopyBufferToImage, vkCmdCopyImageToBuffer, and vkCmdCopyImage (later made extensible in VK_KHR_copy_commands2 and Vulkan 1.3). These functions are essential as the physical layout of an image (otherwise known as memory swizzling) created with VK_IMAGE_TILING_OPTIMAL is opaque to the application, so it cannot meaningfully copy to and from such an image by mapping its device memory on the host. What’s more, its device memory may not be host-mappable to begin with. However, the Vulkan implementation is capable of copying to and from these types of images with hardware-accelerated swizzling.

The glTF™ open standard 3D asset format from the Khronos Group enables online retailers and adtech platforms to enhance their interactive customer experiences with runtime-efficient, 3D product models. With the latest glTF PBR (Physically Based Rendering) material extensions, artists can create incredibly detailed and realistic assets – but in many cases, they’ve been held back by concerns about how these assets would perform on the web due to large texture sizes. Today, Khronos is releasing the open source glTF-Compressor tool for interactively optimizing and fine tuning texture compression settings, to help users adjust their 3D assets for optimal web delivery.

Despite its convenience, online shopping for hardware products and home goods lacks many of the charms of the physical, in-person shopping experience. When you see a product with your own eyes, you can more readily imagine what it looks like in your living room, garage, backyard, or wherever you need it. This visualization process plays a highly influential role in consumer purchasing decisions.

Meta is excited to announce the release of our new open-source Intermediate Graphics Library (IGL)! At Meta, we are committed to building open standards for 3D graphics in partnership with the broader industry and the Khronos® Group. After months of hard work and dedication, we're thrilled to share our latest creation with the development community. IGL provides developers with a powerful set of tools for creating high-quality visuals and g

On April 27, 2023 the Vulkan® Ray Tracing TSG released the VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch extension, which exposes the ability to fetch vertex positions from an acceleration structure hit when tracing rays. The SPIR-V SPV_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch and GLSL GL_EXT_ray_tracing_position_fetch extensions have also been released to provide SPIR-V and GLSL support for this functionality.

Today, Khronos® is releasing a new multi-vendor Vulkan® extension that aims to radically simplify how applications specify shaders and shader state while maintaining Vulkan’s ethos of being a highly performant “API without secrets.” This extension is VK_EXT_shader_object. It introduces a new VkShaderEXT object type which represents a single compiled shader stage, along with 4 new functions to manipulate and use VkShaderE

Streamlining the asset creation pipeline for 3D Commerce and beyond! Model & texture. Public Domain or CC0Image: Copyright ©2023, The Khronos Group, Inc CC-BY 4.0 Online retailers and adtech platforms are increasingly enabling 3D interaction on their sites and apps to increase customer engagement. These companies need to ingest 3D product models from a wide variety of sources, including suppliers, brands, and manufacturers, and many have

Background to Compute in Vulkan Graphics processors have come a long way from simple framebuffer-based 2D display cards to fully programmable high performance devices. One of the most groundbreaking changes in this evolution was the addition of freely programmable compute units, paving the way for general-purpose computations on the GPU (aka “GPGPU”) and leveraging graphics processors for a host of use cases that have traditionally be

There are many approaches to creating realistic-looking materials for 3D objects. However, not all of them are suitable for transmission over the Web, and many have a prohibitively steep learning curve. Physically Based Rendering (PBR) has emerged as an artist-friendly, intuitive, expressive, and robust technique for adding materials to 3D objects. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group has embraced this approach, and over the past few years, they have created formal glTF extensions for a variety of PBR materials. glTF’s growing set of PBR material extensions allow artists to create strikingly realistic 3D objects – suitable for cross-platform applications including browsers, mobile devices, native applications and more – that will perform consistently across a wide range of viewers and devices.

In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively called ‘Vulkan Video’, for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. Today, Khronos is releasing finalized extensions that incorporate industry feedback and expose core and decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.

Khronos will release an ongoing series of Vulkan Video extensions to enable additional codecs and accelerated encode as well as decode. This blog is a general overview of the Vulkan Video architecture and also provides details about the finalized extensions and links to important resources to help you create your first Vulkan Video applications.

The recently released VK_EXT_surface_maintenance1 and VK_EXT_swapchain_maintenance1 extensions resolve a number of longstanding issues with Vulkan's WSI extensions.

We’ve just released an extension that I think will completely change how engines approach descriptors going forward. Descriptor sets are now backed by VkBuffer objects where you memcpy in descriptors. Delete VkDescriptorPool and VkDescriptorSet from the API, and have fun!