Alibaba’s datacenter uses Xilinx FPGAs to accelerate billions of transactions for shoppers and Microsoft, in a recent announcement, said it would deploy Xilinx in its datacenter as well. This is good news for OpenCL, as Xilinx FPGA acceleration includes support for high-level programming languages and tools, including C, C++, and OpenCL.

Artifact is now available with launch-day support for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Artifact is a competitive digital card game. The game is targeting Dota 2 players as well as card gaming enthusiasts. Vulkan support on macOS is done through MoltenVK.

Intel’s open-source programming function computer vision library OpenCV has released the first stable version in its 4.0 line. Release highlights list the dnn module now includes experimental Vulkan backend, and the popular Kinect Fusion algorithm has been implemented and optimized for CPU and GPU using OpenCL.

Basemark has releases version 1.1 of the its multi-platform graphics hardware evaluation tool Basemark GPU for enthusiasts and professionals alike. Basemark GPU 1.1 Benchmark offers unparalleled, objective comparisons between Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES and now DirectX 12 for graphics performance analysis across both mobile and desktop platforms.

The Khronos Group has been thinking about ways that we can provide the community with a new space to chat, ask questions and learn from one another. With this in mind we have created a Slack that is open to all developers interested in or currently developing with Khronos Standards.

Please join us by using this link.

There are channels for each active standard and some more casual channels where you can hang out, share your work, and discuss more general topics. We encourage everyone to take part in the “Ask Anything” channel either to ask questions or help others. Although representatives of Khronos Member’s may be in a channel, non-public and/or internal only information about standards or a specific members technology will not be shared in this Slack. The Slack will be moderated and the standard Khronos Code of Conduct applies.

Update: Due to a bug in 1.1.92.0, 1.1.92.1 has been released. Fixed: a loader bug when initializing the VK_EXT_debug_utils extension where the loader would pass in invalid instance handle to layers. This would cause a crash in layers that attempted to use the extension.

This latest release of the LunarG SDK supports Vulkan API revision 1.1.92. Introducing vkconfig, the new Vulkan Configurator tool. This is a graphical application that allows a user to specify which layers will be loaded by Vulkan applications at runtime. VulkanSDK Ubuntu packages are no longer in beta. As well, seven new extensions have been added: VK_EXT_calibrated_timestamps, VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier, VK_EXT_pci_bus_info, VK_EXT_transform_feedback, VK_GOOGLE_decorate_string, VK_AMD_memory_overallocation_behavior, VK_NV_ray_tracing.

The Khronos Group is trying to better understand how the community have learnt or is learning to use the Vulkan API. We’d like to gather insight on which resources are most or least useful as well as candid feedback on how we handle Vulkan education in general across a variety of areas. The survey takes approximately 10 - 15 minutes. We hope that you can find the time to complete this short survey, the results of this survey will be used to improve our overall Vulkan education offering as part of a major update to Vulkan web resources next year.

Vendetta Online, the MMO from Guild Software Inc that has supported Linux for a long time is going to add Vulkan support alongside some other fun sounding advancements. For Vulkan support, they’ve already had it working since early 2018 and it recently became optional for Windows players. As they make improvements, it will be rolled out for Linux too. They will still support OpenGL, for now, until some time in future when all development is going into the Vulkan renderer.

The AMD Radeon RX 590 graphics card is built upon 12nm process technology and the advanced AMD “Polaris” architecture, including 4th Gen GCN graphics cores, display engine and multimedia cores to enable exceptional performance in low-level APIs like DirectX 125 and Vulkan. It also provides stunning HD gaming experience running at up to 60 FPS or higher in the most popular AAA games, and up to 100 FPS in some of the most popular eSports titles.

Nallatech and BittWare have announced their FPGA products supporting OpenCL-based tool flows for Xilinx and Intel will be marketed under the BittWare brand, part of Molex. Customers will be able to program applications using traditional HDL or higher abstraction C, C++ and OpenCL-based tool flows. Read the full press release. Nallatech also announced it will deliver its family of OpenCL-compatible accelerator cards featuring Altera Stratix V FPGAs to the High Performance Computing (HPC) market. More on this here.

Shader Conductor is one of several open-source projects for going from one shading language to another. With Microsoft’s Shader Conductor the focus is on converting HLSL to GLSL or SPIR-V (OpenGL/Vulkan), ESSL (OpenGL ES), MSL (Apple Metal), and older HLSL shader models. Shader Conductor can handle all shader stages, including geometry and compute shaders. Learn more about this new Open Source project from Microsoft.

In Adobe Dimension 2.0, a new feature has been introduced that lets users export their 3D scenes to be viewed in a web browser by anyone with a link. This is achieved using glTF. “Behind the Scenes with Adobe Dimension Engineers: How We Built the 3D Publish Feature” covers in detail some of the hurdles Adobe engineers had to get over. From Lighting, Transparency and Cameras to the web viewer, learn what was involved in bringing glTF to Adobe Dimension 2.0.

Planning on attending SC’18 in Dallas this week? Be sure to attend the BOF by Michael Wong of CodePlay on Tuesday at 5:15pm. He will be discussising C++ frameworks for parallel programming, including SYCL. More details on his talk are on the Khronos event page.

Magic Leap has made the session on Seedling from Insomniac Games available to the public. Featuring Joel Bartley, lead gameplay programmer for Insomniac Games, and Michael Liebenow, lead software engineer for Magic Leap, the session examines how to integrate a 3D engine into an app using the Vulkan API. “We support two low-level rendering APIs, both Vulkan and OpenGL, but we feel that Vulkan provides more opportunities for optimization, which is especially important when you’re trying to get all the performance you can out of a mobile system, and that is one of the main reasons why we recommend Vulkan for your development,” said Liebenow during the session.

Samsung has announced an enhanced iteration of the Vulkan API, which offers a 10% performance improvement as compared to the OpenGL ES. Samsung has also announced new features for GPUWatch, a tool that aids developers monitor and measure performance between Vulkan and OpenGL ES.