News Archives

AMD has added mesh nodes to their Vulkan experimental extension, VK_AMDX_shader_enqueue. With mesh nodes available in a Work Graph, dispatching a single payload can kick off a variety of compute and rendering tasks, completely driven by the GPU. This update also brings support for the Work Graph HLSL syntax. Although Work Graphs are a experimental feature in Vulkan at this time, AMD is committed to its development.

Learn to integrate modern rendering techniques into a 3D real-time rendering engine with the new Vulkan 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook being released January 9th. Per-order your copy today! (also available for the Kindle)

This week LunarG released a new Vulkan SDK for Windows, Linux, & macOS that supports Vulkan API revision 1.3.296.0. This release contains a beta version of slang.

Blender 4.3 provides initial support for rendering the Blender UI using the Vulkan API on Windows and Linux. It is treated as experimental and initially focused on feature parity and stability. Over time, more performance work is expected on the Blender Vulkan UI.

The new release adds support for new extensions, including device generated commands and pipeline binaries. It also includes some MacOS and iOS fixes.

With the release of Vulkan 1.3.296 (change log), the new Device-Generated Commands extension makes it possible to prepare sequences of commands to run directly from the GPU, and executing those sequences directly without any data going through the CPU. Igalia’s Ricardo Garcia penned a blog detailing this new extension.

The Godot Engine is undergoing exciting updates as part of a Khronos-sponsored project to accelerate the integration of OpenXR functionality, marking a significant advancement in democratizing OpenXR development through open-source engines and tools.

In this blog post, we’ll delve into how feature enhancements to Godot’s open source engine are being made possible through the support of the Khronos OpenXR Working Group and the collaborative efforts of the open-source community.

The FFmpeg multimedia library continues to enhance its support around the Vulkan Video APIs with the latest commits seeing H.264 and H.265/HEVC Vulkan encode support merged.

Microsoft’s Direct3D and HLSL teams shared some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released, DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V. Their HLSL team is committed to open development processes and are collaborating with The Khronos Group and LLVM Project. They’re sharing this information at the beginning of their multi-year development process for transparency about this transition from the start. Microsoft is working with the Khronos SPIR and Vulkan Working Groups to ensure that this transition benefits the whole development ecosystem.

SIGGRAPH is one of the world’s most significant and long-standing conferences focused on computer graphics and interactive techniques. For the Khronos Group, SIGGRAPH represents an essential opportunity to connect with the developers, engineers, artists, and technical professionals that make up the primary users of Khronos standards like ANARI, glTF, OpenXR, WebGL, and Vulkan.

Through Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, presentations, networking events, and face-to-face member meetings at SIGGRAPH, Khronos shares new and forthcoming technical breakthroughs, gathers feedback, learns about user needs and promotes best practices. This year, Khronos hosted nine public-facing events over four days: Presentation materials and video recordings for these events are now available on the Khronos SIGGRAPH 2024 Event Page.

PyTorch 2.4 now supports Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series and the SYCL software stack, making it easier to speed up your AI workflows for both training and inference. This update allows a consistent programming experience with minimal coding effort and extends PyTorch’s device and runtime capabilities, including device, stream, event, generator, allocator, and guard, to seamlessly support streaming devices. This enhancement simplifies deploying PyTorch on ubiquitous hardware, making it easier for you to integrate different hardware back ends.

Given that more developers were interested in creating applications for the growing number of Windows 11 ARM-based machines, last month LunarG released a Vulkan SDK for Windows 11 ARM64 architectures as a public Beta.

The latest update to Ultra Engine, version 0.9.7, introduces a new decals system built into the clustered forward+ renderer. Decals blend seamlessly with glTF material properties including color, normal, metallic-roughness, and transparency. Particle emitters are now implemented, as well as per-entity emission color and texture offsets for easy control of conveyer belts, tank treads, and other texture-scrolling effects. Ultra Engine continues to leverage Khronos technologies to provide up to 10x faster framerates for games and VR applications. Find out about other features included in the latest Ultra Engine release.

The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension, enabling direct retrieval of binary data associated with individual pipelines, bypassing the VkPipelineCache mechanism, and enabling applications to explicitly manage pipeline caching. Applications that do not need the advanced functionality of the new VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension can continue to use VkPipelineCache objects for their simplicity and optimized implementation. But developers that are not satisfied with the VkPipelineCache API should read on to learn more about this powerful new approach.

On June 21, 2024 the Vulkan SC working group at the Khronos Group released the Vulkan SC 1.0.15 specification, the latest maintenance update to the “Vulkan Safety Critical” open standard API, which enables GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in systems that are certified to meet industry functional safety standards.

This blog post is on the latest Vulkan SC developments, including significant new functionality in the Vulkan SC validation layers and broadened availability of NVIDIA Vulkan SC drivers.