Intel announces the Windows Graphics Driver Version 24.20.100.6025. Included in this update is support for Vulkan 1.1. Platforms include 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core processor family as well as Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake.

Last Saturday saw the latest update to the XGL component of the AMDVLK open-source Linux Vulkan driver. This incorporates the work done internally by AMD developers on their official Vulkan driver code-base. The latest update exposes AMD_shader_ballot and AMD_gpu_shader_half_float. More details are available on the GPUOpen-Drivers repository and via this commit.

Nsight Graphics is a suite of debugging and profiling tools for graphics applications. Version 1.1 now includes support for Vulkan 1.1.

A new GPUOpen has posted a new blog tutorial on reducing Vulkan API call overhead. This article looks at costs associated with complex applications that may end up calling Vulkan functions tens or hundreds of thousands of times per frame, and ways to reduce these calls. The technical read is from author Arseny Kapoulkine, who has worked on game technology for the past decade.

Khronos Group promoter member NVIDIA has released the GeForce 397.31 driver. This driver release provides full support for the new Vulkan 1.1 API and passes the Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) version 1.1.0.3. As well, this driver supports OpenCL 1.2 and OpenGL 4.6.

Jonathan Voudrie has a Bachelors degree in counseling, is in PTSD recovery, owns Oculus Rift, and is a Twitch streamer that sees the potential for VR technology to improve people’s lives. Read his interview on VR Fitness Insider, where he talks therapy, fitness and recommendations. When asked “Which causes, apps, companies, or individuals do you think are fighting the good fight in the virtual reality industry?” we were happy to see feels Khronos is on the right path with OpenXR. Thank you Jonathan!

The Khronos Group is once again sponsoring the The International Workshop on OpenCL (IWOCL). An annual meeting of OpenCL application developers, researchers and suppliers coming together to share OpenCL best practice and to promote the evolution and advancement of the OpenCL standard. Distributed & Heterogeneous Programming for C/C++ (DHPCC++) will take place on the workshop track of the IWOCL with #IWOCL2018 being held in Oxford, UK, on May 14-16, 2018. Learn more about IWOCL 2018 and Register today.

Don’t miss this year’s OpenVX Workshop at Embedded Vision Summit on May 24th, 2018. Khronos will present a day-long hands-on workshop all about OpenVX cross-platform neural network acceleration API for embedded vision applications. We’ve developed a new curriculum so even if you attended in past years, this is a do-not-miss, jam-packed tutorial with new information on computer vision algorithms for feature tracking and neural networks mapped to the graph API. We’ll be doing a hands-on practice session that gives participants a chance to solve real computer vision problems using OpenVX with the folks who created the API. We’ll also be talking about the OpenVX roadmap and what’s to come.

Join the folks that formed the standard for a day packed with sessions on how to get the most out of Vulkan. Learn the latest developments in the Vulkan API and hear from other graphics developers about their experiences. Learn about new features in Vulkan 1.1, including subgroup functionality, the shader toolchain for HLSL in Vulkan, memory management, and more. The day will include breakout sessions to facilitate discussions on specific use cases, and lessons learnt by developers porting to Vulkan. Speakers confirmed from AMD, Google, LunarG, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Samsung, with more to come! There will be plenty of opportunities to provide your feedback, and a Q&A panel comprised of the speakers of the day – so bring your toughest questions! Registration is now open.

Enterprises should find it easier to tap the benefits of FPGAs now that Dell EMC and Fujitsu are putting Intel Arria 10 GX Programmable Acceleration Cards into off-the-shelf servers for the data center. The Arria 10 GX cards offers the Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL to help ease programming hurdles. Xilinx has also been building up the software stack for its own FPGA product families, and recently announced what it calls a new category of programmable chip – the Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP). It says that developers can work with ACAPS using standard tools like C/C++, OpenCL, and Python.

A new blog post on UploadVR provides a blueprint for people to think about the spatial computing revolution over the next six years. Part of this future looks how a combined roll-out of OpenXR with the broader adoption of formats like glTF may allow us to start to see the underpinnings of an actual interconnected universe like the OASIS or Metaverse.

The Khronos Group has made public the SPIRV LLVM Translator Github repository which contains source code for the LLVM/SPIR-V Bi-Directional Translator, a library for translating between LLVM and SPIR-V. The LLVM/SPIR-V Bi-Directional Translator is open source software.

Draco is a glTF extension for mesh compression along with an open-source library developed by Google to compress and decompress 3D meshes to significantly reduce the size of 3D content. Cesium has been collaborating with Khronos and Google to make Draco a glTF extension, and you can now load Draco compressed models and 3D tilesets in Cesium. Learn more about Draco, how it works and what it has to offer.

The Khronos Group has released Vulkan CTS 1.1.1.0. This is the first major update since the initial 1.1.0.3 release and adds adds 26272 new tests.

glTF continues to gain strong industry momentum with new support from major players including Facebook, Adobe, Epic, and Unity, in addition to the ongoing support from the grassroots open-source community. Facebook’s recent adoption of glTF 2.0 enables its users to place and see 3D content in their News Feeds, underscoring the social media platform’s plan to enable users to bring 3D objects and assets with them across AR, VR, mobile, and web experiences — using open standards. Khronos has released new glTF testing tools, samples, and exporters to support this growing ecosystem.