A liaison between W3C and the Khronos Group was setup to coordinate on shared areas of interest. Exploratory work includes the GPU for the Web Community Group discussing possible use of SPIR-V as shading language for WebGPU with the Khronos Group through that liaison.

We are just one week away from Halo: Reach coming to PC after a lengthy stint as an Xbox exclusive title. In preparation for the big release, NVIDIA has begun rolling out the Game Ready driver with optimisations. In addition, Quake II RTX has had an upgrade to further improve the ray-traced remaster. This latest driver also brings Image Sharpening support for OpenGL and Vulkan games. (Source: Kitguru.net)

The 3D Commerce Working Group was created in July 2019 to align the industry for streamlined 3D content creation, management and display. The group brings together companies involved with all facets of the industry—from production to distribution to consumption of 3D content. To download the new logo or any other Khronos Group logo, please visit the official Khronos Logos page.

Radeon ProRender enables physically-based GPU rendering through OpenCL. Now with our Full Spectrum Rendering modes, it also brings Vulkan-based ray tracing to Windows and Linux users. This allows the user to set the quality level to a wide spectrum from rasterized to fully path-traced (in OpenCL) render quality, enabling everything from fast viewport previews to accurate final renders.

NVIDIA Nsight Systems 2019.6 is now available for download. This release expands graphics trace on Windows by adding support for Direct3D 11, WDDM CPU+GPU queues, and OpenGL. On Linux, new features include support for CUDA 10.2, simultaneous CLI sessions, DWARF unwind and capture by hotkey. OpenGL trace on Windows tracks functions and the batches of GPU workloads produced.

From the 2019 Reboot Develop Red conference, the complete set of Khronos track talks are now online. Thank you to the Khronos members and developer community for all of your help! We had an excellent line-up of talks:

• World War Z – Using Vulkan to Tame the Zombie Swarm – Video & Slides
  
• Bringing Ray Tracing to Vulkan – Video & Slides
  
• Getting Faster and Leaner on Mobile: Optimizing Roblox with Vulkan – Video & Slides
  
• Mobilising Call of Duty: Bringing a Blockbuster title to Android – Video & Slides

The developers of the Flax Engine announce that Linux support with Vulkan is coming. This includes high-performant Vulkan rendering and high-DPI monitor support.
Game developers can deploy their games to support desktop gaming on Linux or use special build options to run a game in the cloud for multiplayer and streaming purposes.

In ComputeCpp v1.1.6–Codeplay’s implementation of the open standard SYCL–Codeplay introduces an optimization to the way SYCL work-items map to OpenCL processing elements in order to improve performance in the most common use cases. This blog post will start by providing an overview of what has changed and if and how you may need to update your SYCL code.

Codeplay Software announces Acoran, the standards based platform for AI programmers. Acoran is compatible with Khronos compute standards and Intel’s oneAPI platform, enabling AI processor solutions to align with application developers by taking advantage of established standards and libraries. Codeplay has developed the Acoran platform based on the most relevant and preferred standards, with a comprehensive set of libraries that give AI developers an assured feature set for their applications. With strong momentum in Khronos standards in the industry, SYCL, OpenCL and Vulkan are at the core of the platform, with further support that includes these open source projects.

The Vulkan Working Group has just released the VK_KHR_performance_query extension, which provides a cross-vendor common mechanism to expose performance metrics. These may be used to obtain data from a Vulkan device, typically a graphics card or SoC, to measure the workload demand and assess the impact of application modifications and optimizations.

​Back in June 2019 Intel launched oneAPI - a single, unified programming model that aims to simplify development across multiple architectures – such as CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and accelerators. This weekend, Intel posted a fact sheet on oneAPI. Learn more about Intel’s oneAPI, why oneAPI is an open specification, what is included in the specification, what Data Parallel C++ is, and how does SYCL fit in, in the fact sheet.

SuperComputing (SC19) is the largest gathering of high performance computing experts in the world and it kicks off this weekend, Sunday, November 17 in Denver, CO. To kick off the conference, the Fifth International Workshop on Heterogeneous High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (H2RC 2019) will host two presentations on Sunday solely-focused on SYCL, the Khronos open standard language for C++ single-source heterogeneous programming for OpenCL. The keynote delivered by Ronan Keryell from Khronos member, Xilinx and will outline the benefits of using SYCL for FPGA programming in a talk entitled “SYCL: A Single-Source C++ Standard for Heterogeneous Computing.” Later in the morning at 11:00am Michael Kinsner and John Freeman from Intel will present “Data Flow Pipes: A SYCL Extension for Spatial Architectures,” describing the pipes extension that enables a more usable and flexible interface.

The Khronos Group has issued a call for participation in the newly formed Analytic Rendering Exploratory Group. The group has been formed to discuss the standardization of an Analytic Rendering API for data visualization. All interested parties are invited to participate, with no cost or IP obligations, to share perspectives, requirements and use cases to help determine whether there is an industry need for such an API and to help set the direction for any standardization activities. Learn more about what Analytic Rendering is why a new analytic rendering API is needed and what the goals of such a group might look like. If your company, or a company you know is interested in learning more and joining the Exploratory Group, you are invited to contact us.

A new blog by Attilio Provenzano from Arm explores a few of the options available to improve both descriptor and buffer management. The underlying issue of descriptor management is intertwined with that of buffer management, which is choosing how to pack data in  VkBuffer  objects. Some of the approaches presented in this blog are also covered in greater detail in “Writing and efficient Vulkan renderer” by Arseny Kapoulkine from “GPU Zen 2: Advanced Rendering Techniques”, along with some more options. Samsung also covered descriptor set caching in a presentation at GDC 2019 where they are bringing Fortnite to mobile platforms. You are encouraged to check out the project on Vulkan Mobile Best Practice GitHub page and try the sample for yourself. The tutorials have just been donated to The Khronos Group.

Cylindo is the fastest growing 3D product visualization platform. Trusted by global furniture retailers and brands, Cylindo’s platform provides photo-realistic visuals and tools to engage and convert audiences across channels.