LOS ANGELES — The Khronos Group (www.khronos.org), an open consortium of hardware and software companies, has significantly expanded the scope and momentum for its family of open standard 3D graphics APIs. The new generation Vulkan API for high-efficiency access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs is on track for implementation and specifications later this year and has received support from Android, SteamOS, Tizen, and many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Red Hat.
The new OpenGL ES 3.2 specification that was released absorbs AEP (Android Extension Pack) functionality to enhance pervasive graphics capabilities across mobile, consumer and automotive devices. Finally, a set of OpenGL extensions has been released to expose the latest capabilities of desktop hardware.
Vulkan provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability, and uses Khronos’ new SPIR-V intermediate language specification for shading language flexibility. Vulkan minimizes driver overhead and enables multi-threaded performance on mobile, desktop, console, and embedded platforms. In parallel with finalizing the Vulkan specification, Khronos is working to catalyze and drive an in-depth Vulkan ecosystem, which includes reaching out to key non-Khronos developers for feedback during specification drafting and constructing an open source Vulkan conformance test suite leveraging and merging with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) drawElements Quality Program (dEQP) framework to enable direct feedback and contributions from developers to resolve cross-vendor inconsistencies.
On Wednesday at SIGGRAPH, attendees are invited to the “Khronos 3D Graphics API BOF,” taking place from 5pm to 7pm at the JW Marriott LA Live in the Platinum Ballroom Salon F-I. There, they can learn more details around the latest developments in the 3D ecosystem.