The Khronos Group has posted the complete slide decks from SIGGRAPH 2015 BOFs online. Included in the slides are the many presentations from WebGL, along with slides from the 3D, OpenCL and OpenVX BOF.

This Vulkan demo from Intel shows the power and performance improvements resulting from a thinner, better optimized 3D API. Vulkan API is on track for release before the end of this year.

Toptal Technical editor Nermin Hajdarbegovic has written great overview on Vulkan. If you’re curious how this new API slated compares to OpenGL, or how it relates to SPIR-V, this would be a good starting point.

Get Hands-on with Mobile Graphics! “An Introduction to Mobile Graphics” are one day workshops offered by Imagination Technologies in North London. At Universities, graphics technologies are generally taught as part of game development or the computer science curriculum, and are based on standard console or PC graphics. Since mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular, it is important that developers also understand the specific constraints of mobile devices where power-efficient rendering is a must. Imagination is partnering with Darren McKie (games and graphics programme leader at the University of Hull) to organize a workshop designed to introduce real-time rendering using OpenGL ES on mobile devices to students who have little or no prior experience with 3D graphics programming.

AMD announced the release of APP SDK 3.0 supporting OpenCL 2.0. AMD APP SDK 3.0 adds support for Windows 10 as well as AMD’s latest 6th generation AMD A-series processors, Radeon R9 series graphics cards and FirePro W8100 and W9100 series graphics cards. AMD APP SDK 3.0 contains a complete set of sample code illustrating how to utilize each of the major new features of OpenCL 2.0. Some of these features are highlighted in the OpenCL 2.0 Demystified blog-series.

This Imagination Technologies article and a follow-up to be published next month introduce OpenCL programming for the PowerVR Rogue architecture. Starting with an overview of OpenCL programming fundamentals using a basic program, followed by an explanation of OpenCL execution on Rogue GPUs. This provides the background to understand the programming guidelines for the Rogue architecture which are illustrated by using a case study of an image filtering program.

This is a tool to generate OpenGL function loaders. Select the language, OpenGL / OpenGL ES versions, core or compat profiles, and hit generate. The tool generates a header file with the declarations for the GL functions and enums for the chosen GL version, and generates a little C source file that resolves all of the functions at runtime. Many thanks to Mark Sunet on LinkedIn for pointing us to this project.

glTF is an up and coming format for transmitting 3D models, tailored for WebGL and OpenGL they like to think of it as a 3D model codec. There’s three.js and Node.js support, as well as a COLLADA and separate FBX converter. There’s more explanation of glTF in the presentation at the WebGL BOF. Compression progress here, discussion here. Special thanks to Patrick Cozzi and the folks over at Real-Time Rendering Blog.

GPU-STREAM allows you to measure memory transfer rates to and from global device memory on GPUs. This benchmark is similar in spirit, and based on, the STREAM benchmark for CPUs. Unlike other GPU memory bandwidth benchmarks this does not include the PCIe transfer time.

Advanced Simulation Library (ASL) is a free and open source multiphysics simulation software package. Its computational engine is based, among others, on the Lattice Boltzmann Methods and is written in OpenCL which enable extraordinarily efficient deployment on a variety of massively parallel architectures, ranging from inexpensive FPGAs, DSPs and GPUs up to heterogeneous clusters and supercomputers. ASL is distributed under the free GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) with an optional commercial license.

As there has been lots of new information on Vulkan, Khronos‘ new graphics and compute API Sascha Willems decided to do a write up of the new API from a hobby 3D developer’s point of view.

Neil Trevett recently spoke at the Embedded Vision conference on “Navigating the Vision API Jungle: Which API Should You Use and Why?” For the full version of this video, along with hundreds of others on various embedded vision topics, please visit the Embedded Vision website.

The Khronos Group BOF Blitz is live streaming all BOFs. Starting with “Accelerating Vision Processing” at 1PM PT followed by “Heterogeneous Computing” at 2PM and “3D Web Graphics” at 3:45PM. Finally, at 5:30PM there will be the “3D Graphics API State of the Union” BOF which will include Vulkan:

The Khronos Group announced significantly expanded scope and momentum for its family of open standard 3D graphics APIs. Vulkan™, the new generation API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs, is on track for implementation and specifications later this year. It has received support from Android, SteamOS, Tizen, and multiple Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Red Hat.  The new OpenGL® ES 3.2 specification absorbs AEP (Android Extension Pack) functionality to enhance pervasive graphics capabilities across mobile, consumer, and automotive devices.  A set of OpenGL extensions will also expose the very latest capabilities of desktop hardware.


Press Release (Khronos Press Briefing slidedeck)

Feedback forum

Registry

Valve and LunarG are working closely with Khronos to provide Vulkan developers with open source tools. These tools and first drivers are expected to be available for Vulkan developers during 2015. Valve is sponsoring LunarG to provide Open Source Tools, a prepackaged SDK, and technical support for Game Developers bringing their 3D engines to the new Vulkan API.