A recent update to the Xenko Engine docs include how to select your platform, including Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenGL ES.

Today Intel announced record results on a new benchmark in deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN). The test took place in Nanjing City, China, where ZTE’s engineers used Intel’s midrange Arria 10 FPGA for a cloud inferencing application using a CNN algorithm. The benchmark was achieved on a server holding 4S Intel Xeon E5-2670v3 processors running at 2.30GHz, 128GB DDR4; Intel PSG Arria 10 FPGA Development Kit with one 10AGX115 FPGA, 4GB DDR4 SODIMM, Intel Quartus Prime and OpenCL SDK v16.1. Besides the impressive increase in performance, the team at the ZTE Wireless Institute sped design time with the use of the OpenCL programming language.

With the release of Firefox 51, WebGL 2.0 support has landed! WebGL is a standard API to render 3D graphics in the Web. To date, we have been able to use WebGL 1.0 (based on OpenGL ES 2) to render fancy graphics into a <canvas> element. WebGL 2.0, however, is based on the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification, which introduces new features – many of them aimed at increasing performance and visual fidelity.

The Khronos Group today announced that it has placed conformance tests for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES open standard APIs for 3D graphics into open source. Khronos has created a new GitHub source repository that will hold test sources for OpenGL and OpenGL ES as well the test suite for Vulkan that was open sourced when Vulkan launched. The unified repository will encourage streamlined and accelerated development of tests for Khronos 3D APIs. The Khronos 3D API test sources are made available under the Apache 2.0 license at the repository available here.

Have you ever needed/wanted to re-use existing C/C++ code in a web page? Perhaps a graphics effect written in OpenGL ES? With Unity WebGL there is a way! A Unity blog post on how to implement a low level plugin.

A new Vulkan Video tutorial series on Youtube. This tutorial is done in German.

Redhat’s David Airlie gave a talk on Vulkan at the Linux Conference a few days ago–a brief introduction to the API and how supported the API is under Linux. David also discusses possible future uses for this new API and the advantages it brings.

LunarG has updated their site to include Vulkan headers for v1.0.39.0. This release contains updates to the loader, parameter validation, and docs for the following extensions:
• VK_KHR_get_physical_device_properties2

• VK_KHR_maintenance1

• VK_KHR_shader_draw_parameters

• VK_EXT_direct_mode_display

• VK_EXT_display_surface_counter

• VK_EXT_display_control


The LoaderAndLayerInterface document has been updated and reorganized for ease of use.

Only 10 days left to get your OpenCL abstracts and papers in for IWOCL 2017 in Toronto.

The Khronos OpenVX working group is soliciting quotes for enhancing and expanding the OpenVX Conformance Test Suite. OpenVX is an open, royalty-free standard for cross platform acceleration of computer vision applications. Any company, whether a Khronos member or not, is cordially invited to contact Khronos and provide a quote. Interested parties can access the details of the request on the Khronos website.

VkHLF is an experimental high-level framework for Vulkan. This framework implements an abstraction layer atop Vulkan with functionality including simplified resource creation, transparent sub-allocation, resource tracking for the CPU/GPU, and more.

Paulo Miguel Dias updated his Padoka PPA (Personal Package Archive) for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10 operating systems to the latest Mesa 17.0.0-git, bringing us OpenGL 4.5 support for Intel Haswell GPUs.

Imagination Technologies announced PowerVR ‘Series8XE Plus’ GPUs this week. The Series8XE Plus GPUs include support for the latest APIs including OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.0 and OpenVX 1.1.

For a great introduction to glTF, join the Khronos Group for the upcoming webinar on February 14th. If you are a developer making engines or importers, viewers, or other tools that work with 3D graphics, then you need to be looking at glTF. Attend this webinar to learn the basic concepts of glTF with a demonstration of key points. This 1-hour session includes time for the presenter and some of the key shapers of the format to answer your questions.

NVIDIA 378.09 beta driver has aded support for the Vulkan extensions VK_KHR_display and VK_KHR_display_swapchain. OpenGL threaded optimizations is enabled by default in the driver, as well the driver has added support for the ARB_parallel_shader_compile extension to allow multi-threaded compilation of GLSL shaders.