The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.
The Khronos Group announced the availability of technical previews of the new Vulkan™ open standard API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices. This ground-up design, previously referred to as the Next Generation OpenGL Initiative, provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability, and uses Khronos’ new SPIR-V™ specification for shading language flexibility. Vulkan initial specifications and implementations are expected later this year and any company may participate in Vulkan’s ongoing development by joining Khronos.
The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 2.1 provisional specification. OpenCL 2.1 is a significant evolution of the open, royalty-free standard for heterogeneous parallel programming that defines a new kernel language based on a subset of C++ for significantly enhanced programmer productivity, and support for the new Khronos SPIR-V cross-API shader program intermediate language now used by both OpenCL and the new Vulkan graphics API.
In another significant announcement today, OpenCL 2.1 and Vulkan™, the new open standard API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs, are now sharing core intermediate language technologies resulting in SPIR-V; a revolution in the Khronos Standard Portable Intermediate Representation initially used by OpenCL™, now fully defined by Khronos with native support for shader and kernel features. SPIR-V splits the compiler chain, enabling high-level language front-ends to emit programs in a standardized intermediate form to be ingested by Vulkan or OpenCL drivers. Eliminating the need for a built-in high-level language source compiler significantly reduces driver complexity and will enable a diversity of language front-ends. Additionally, a standardized IR provides a measure of kernel IP protection, accelerated kernel load times and enables developers to use a common language front-end, improving kernel reliability and portability across multiple implementations. You can read more on the SPIR homepage, registry and whitepaper, and give us valuable community feedback in our SPIR forum. Read More
Gabe Newell, co-founder and managing director of Valve, talks Steam Machines, Free Source 2.0 Engine, the growth of PCs, Steam Controller and Vulkan.
Read More
Voices of VR has three new podcasts featuring Neil Trevett, President of the Khronos Group. The podcasts include an overview of the Khronos Group, the new Vulkan API, OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V. Read More
As more and more devices support the OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics feature set, there needs to be a benchmark to test these devices and see how well they do with OpenGL ES 3.1 games that take advantage of all the new features. RightWare has released its newest version of Basemark ES, which is also the only benchmark tool available on the market to test the new OpenGL ES 3.1 features -- Basemark ES 3.1. Read More
The Khronos group has uploaded slide decks from the Vulkan and OpenCL presentations at GDC. The original press briefing slide deck is included. The slides cover SPIR-V as well and can also be seen in the online video from the March 5th Vulkan session. Read More
