Microsoft's Direct3D and HLSL teams have unveiled plans to integrate SPIR-V support into DirectX 12 with the upcoming release of Shader Model 7. This significant transition marks a new era in GPU programmability, as it aims to unify the intermediate representation for graphical-shader stages and compute kernels. SPIR-V, an open standard intermediate representation for graphics and compute shaders, will replace the proprietary DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) as the shader interchange format for DirectX 12. The adoption of SPIR-V is expected to ease development processes across multiple GPU runtime environments. By embracing this open standard, Microsoft aims to enhance HLSL's position as the premier language for compiling graphics and compute shaders across various devices and APIs. This transition is part of a multi-year development process, during which Microsoft will work closely with The Khronos Group and the LLVM Project. The company has joined Khronos' SPIR and Vulkan working groups to ensure smooth collaboration and rapid feature adoption.

While the transition will take several years, Microsoft is providing early notice to allow developers and partners to plan accordingly. The company will offer translation tools between SPIR-V and DXIL to facilitate a gradual transition for both application and driver developers. For those not familiar with graphics development, graphics APIs ship with virtual instruction set architectures (ISA) that abstracts standard hardware features at a higher level. As GPUs don't follow the same ISA as CPUs (x86, Arm, RISC-V), this virtual ISA is needed to define some generics in the GPU architecture and allow various APIs like DirectX and Vulkan to run. Instead of focusing support on several formats like DXIL, Microsoft is embracing the open SPIR-V standard, which will become de facto for API developers in the future, allowing focus on more features instead of constantly replicating each other's functions. While DXIL is used mainly for gaming environments, SPIR-V has adoption in high-performance computing as well, with OpenCL and SYCL. Gaming presence is also there with Vulkan API, and we expect to see SPIR-V join DirectX 12 games.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest roadmap milestone for Vulkan, the cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. The Vulkan roadmap targets the "immersive graphics" market, made up of mid- to high-end smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and desktop devices. The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone captures a set of capabilities that are expected to be supported in new products for that market, beginning in 2024. The roadmap specification provides a significant increase in functionality for the targeted devices and sets the evolutionary direction of the API, including both new hardware capabilities and improvements to the programming model for Vulkan developers.

Vulkan Roadmap 2024 is the second milestone release on the Vulkan Roadmap. Products that support it must be Vulkan 1.3 conformant and support the extensions and capabilities defined in both the 2022 and 2024 Roadmap specifications. Vulkan roadmap specifications use the Vulkan Profile mechanism to help developers build portable Vulkan applications; roadmap requirements are expressed in machine-readable JSON files, and tooling in the Vulkan SDK auto-generates code that makes it easy for developers to query for and enable profile support in their applications.

In April 2021, the Vulkan Working Group at Khronos released a set of provisional extensions, collectively referred to as Vulkan Video which provide seamless encoding and decoding of video streams using a variety of video coding standards. The December 2022 release of Vulkan 1.3.238 saw the finalization of the extensions to decode H.264 and H.265, and today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized their counterpart: the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams. Leveraging the Vulkan framework, they provide a standardized, seamless, low-overhead, and highly controllable way to produce H.264 and H.265 video via hardware accelerators, with applications ranging from real-time, low-latency streaming to offline server-scale transcoding.

Incorporating industry feedback, the extensions saw many improvements since their introduction, from a bidirectional interface (overrides) to help with coding and exposing advanced hardware capabilities, to rate control configuration parameters and an interface to aid with quality vs. performance trade-offs. This feedback also prompted the release of the first video maintenance extension. In addition, given the high industry demand for AV1 codec support, an AV1 decode extension release is imminent, with an AV1 encode extension development also underway. Figure 1 depicts Vulkan Video extensions along with their status and relations.

AMD late Thursday released the Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL drivers. While these do not come with optimization for any new games since the previous 23.5.2 drivers, they add several new Vulkan API extensions, and fix a few issues. In particular, they introduce Vulkan-based accelerated video decode for H.264 and H.265 formats, among 8 other extensions spanning the Khronos and Valve trunks. The drivers also claim to improve idle power and multi-monitor power draw of RX 7000 series GPUs.

Among the issues fixed with Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL include sub-optimal VR performance or stuttering noticed with RX 7000 series GPUs, and an application crash for DaVinci Resolve Studio with AV1 video playback. The drivers improve idle- and multi-monitor power-draw for RX 7000 series GPUs on some 4K@144 Hz displays, and multi-monitor configurations. Display corruption noticed with WWE 2K23, and Nioh 2 have been fixed.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Software Adrenalin 23.7.1 WHQL

When it comes to APIs, OpenGL is something of a classic. According to the Khronos Group, OpenGL is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API. Since its launch in 1992 it has been used extensively by software developers for PCs and workstations to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics applications for markets such as CAD, content creation, entertainment, game development and virtual reality.

To date, Imagination GPUs have natively supported OpenGL up until Release 3.3 as well as OpenGL ES (the version of OpenGL for embedded systems), Vulkan (a cross-platform graphics API) and OpenCL (an API for parallel programming). However, thanks to the increasing performance of our top-end GPUs, especially with the likes of the DXT-72-2304, they present a competitive offering to the data centre and desktop (DCD) market. Indeed, we have multiple customers - including the likes of Innosilicon - choosing Imagination GPUs for the flexibility an IP solution, their scalability and their ability to offer up to 6 TFLOPS of compute.

In April 2021, the Vulkan Working Group at Khronos released a set of provisional extensions, collectively called "Vulkan Video," for seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. Today, Khronos is releasing finalized extensions that incorporate industry feedback and expose core and decode Vulkan Video functionality to provide fully accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode.

Khronos will release an ongoing series of Vulkan Video extensions to enable additional codecs and accelerated encode as well as decode. This blog is a general overview of the Vulkan Video architecture and also provides details about the finalized extensions and links to important resources to help you create your first Vulkan Video applications.

A part of the process of building a graphics card is designing compatibility to execute the latest graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan. Today, we have confirmation that Intel's Arc Alchemist discrete graphics cards will be compatible with Vulkan's latest iteration - version 1.3. In January, Khronos, the team behind Vulkan API, released their regular two-year update to the standard. Graphics card vendors like NVIDIA and AMD announced support immediately with their drivers. Today, the Khronos website officially lists Intel Arc Alchemist mobile graphics cards as compatible with Vulkan 1.3 with Intel Arc A770M, A730M, A550M, A370M, and A350M GPUs.

At the time of writing, there is no official announcement for the desktop cards yet. However, given that the mobile SKUs are supporting the latest standard, it is extremely likely that the desktop variants will also carry the same level of support.

Online tracking of users happens when 3rd party services collect information about various people and use that to help identify them in the sea of other online persons. This collection of specific information is often called "fingerprinting," and attackers usually exploit it to gain user information. Today, researchers have announced that they managed to use WebGL (Web Graphics Library) to their advantage and create a unique fingerprint for every GPU out there to track users online. This exploit works because every piece of silicon has its own variations and unique characteristics when manufactured, just like each human has a unique fingerprint. Even among the exact processor models, silicon differences make each product distinct. That is the reason why you can not overclock every processor to the same frequency, and binning exists.

What would happen if someone were to precisely explore the differences in GPUs and use those differences to identify online users by those characteristics? This is exactly what researchers that created DrawnApart thought of. Using WebGL, they run a GPU workload that identifies more than 176 measurements across 16 data collection places. This is done using vertex operations in GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language), where workloads are prevented from random distribution on the network of processing units. DrawnApart can measure and record the time to complete vertex renders, record the exact route that the rendering took, handle stall functions, and much more. This enables the framework to give off unique combinations of data turned into fingerprints of GPUs, which can be exploited online. Below you can see the data trace recording of two GPUs (same models) showing variations.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest updates to Vulkan, the cross-platform 3D graphics API and its ecosystem. The Vulkan 1.3 specification was released today, incorporating and mandating proven, developer-requested extensions to make that functionality consistently available across all supported platforms.

The Vulkan Working Group is developing a public roadmap to provide guidance on when and where more advanced Vulkan functionality will be supported. The Vulkan Roadmap 2022 milestone for mid-to-high-end hardware defines features beyond Vulkan 1.3 that will be available starting this year. Vulkan profiles will be introduced, with tooling, in the February 2022 Vulkan 1.3 SDK to precisely specify, manage and use sets of API capabilities. Profiles will be used to communicate functionality requirements for roadmaps, markets, platforms, and hardware and software developers.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces that LunarG has released the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.2.162.0, with full support for the new Vulkan raytracing extensions, including Validation Layers and integration of upgraded GLSL, HLSL and SPIR-V shader tool chains. The Khronos open source Vulkan Samples and Vulkan Guide have been upgraded to illustrate raytracing techniques. Finally, with production drivers shipping from both AMD and NVIDIA, developers are now enabled to easily integrate Vulkan raytracing into their applications.

Khronos released final Vulkan raytracing extensions in November 2020 to seamlessly integrate raytracing functionality alongside Vulkan's rasterization framework, making Vulkan the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for raytracing acceleration. Vulkan raytracing can be deployed using existing GPU compute or dedicated raytracing cores. The Vulkan SDK now integrates all the components necessary for developers to easily use the new raytracing extensions, such as new shader tool chains, without needing them to be built from multiple repositories, and supports raytracing validation within the SDK validation layers.

Today, Khronos has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate raytracing into the existing Vulkan framework. This is a significant milestone as it is the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for raytracing acceleration - and can be deployed either using existing GPU compute or dedicated raytracing cores. Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, but also introduces advanced functionality such as the ability to load balance raytracing setup operations onto the host CPU. Although raytracing will be first deployed on desktop systems, these Vulkan extensions have been designed to enable and encourage raytracing to also be deployed on mobile.

These extensions were initially released as provisional versions in March 2020. Since that time, we have received and incorporated feedback from hardware vendors and software developers, both inside Khronos and from the wider industry, but the overall shape of the API and the functionality provided are fundamentally unchanged. Thank you to all who reviewed and used the provisional extensions and especially those who provided feedback.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating graphics and compute interoperability standards, announced its SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification, for which Intel has made significant contributions through new programming abstractions. These new capabilities accelerate heterogeneous parallel programming for high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning and compute-intensive applications.

"The SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification marks a significant milestone helping improve time-to-performance in programming heterogeneous computing systems through more productive and familiar C++ programming constructs," said Jeff McVeigh, vice president of Datacenter XPU Products and Solutions at Intel Corporation. "Through active collaboration with The Khronos Group, the new specification includes significant features pioneered in oneAPI's Data Parallel C++, such as unified shared memory, group algorithms and sub-groups that were up-streamed to SYCL 2020. Moving forward, Intel's oneAPI toolkits, which include the SYCL-based Intel oneAPI DPC++ Compiler, will deliver productivity and performance for open, cross-architecture programming."

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating graphics and compute interoperability standards, announces the ratification and public release of the SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification. SYCL is a standard C++ based heterogeneous parallel programming framework for accelerating High Performance Computing (HPC), machine learning, embedded computing, and compute-intensive desktop applications on a wide range of processor architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and AI processors.The SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification is publicly available today to enable feedback from developers and implementers before the eventual specification finalization and release of the SYCL 2020 Adopters Program, which will enable implementers to be officially conformant—tentatively expected by the end of the year.

A royalty-free open standard, SYCL 2020 enables significant programmer productivity through an expressive domain-specific language, compact code, and simplified common patterns, such as Class Template Argument Deduction and Deduction Guides, all while preserving significant backwards compatibility with previous versions. SYCL 2020 is based on C++17 and includes new programming abstractions, such as unified shared memory, reductions, group algorithms, and sub-groups to enable high-performance applications across diverse hardware architectures.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that realistically simulates how light rays intersect and interact with scene geometry, materials, and light sources to generate photorealistic imagery. It is widely used for film and other production rendering and is beginning to be practical for real-time applications and games. Vulkan Ray Tracing seamlessly integrates a coherent ray tracing framework into the Vulkan API, enabling a flexible merging of rasterization and ray tracing acceleration. Vulkan Ray Tracing is designed to be hardware agnostic and so can be accelerated on both existing GPU compute and dedicated ray tracing cores if available.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020.

Vulkan continues to evolve by listening to developer needs, shipping new functionality as extensions, and then consolidating extensions that receive positive developer feedback into a unified core API specification. Carefully selected API features are made optional to enable market-focused implementations. Many Vulkan 1.2 features were requested by developers to meet critical needs in their engines and applications, including: timeline semaphores for easily managed synchronization; a formal memory model to precisely define the semantics of synchronization and memory operations in different threads; descriptor indexing to enable reuse of descriptor layouts by multiple shaders; deeper support for shaders written in HLSL, and more.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the ratification and public release of the OpenXR 0.90 provisional specification. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance access to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)- collectively known as XR-platforms and devices. The new specification can be found on the Khronos website and is released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback at the OpenXR forum.

The OpenXR 0.90 provisional release specifies a cross-platform Application Programming Interface (API) enabling XR hardware platform vendors to expose the functionality of their runtime systems. By accessing a common set of objects and functions corresponding to application lifecycle, rendering, tracking, frame timing, and input, which are frustratingly different across existing vendor-specific APIs, software developers can run their applications across multiple XR systems with minimal porting effort-significantly reducing industry fragmentation.

Intel, via a Game Dev Developer Zone blog post, took it into its hands to urge game developers towards usage of the industry-prevalent Vulkan API. Some unapologetic puns are thrown in, such as "(...) You might say that Vulkan lets apps live long and prosper", but these are only meant to entertain. And it's well known that Intel has supported the Khronos Group and Vulkan's inception from the beginning, alongside Google. The reasons for this blog post to make it into a front page, however, are twofold.

Vulkan APIs are positioned to become one of the next dominant graphics rendering platforms.

NVIDIA made big moves to bring a semblance of real-time ray-tracing to the masses, with the new RTX technology, as part of its efforts to replace rasterized rendering, which has dominated 3D graphics for the past three decades. Microsoft has come out with its own extension to DirectX 12, with the new DXR API. NVIDIA is now reportedly working with the Khronos Group to bring RTX to Vulkan.

A new Vulkan extension titled "VK_NV_raytracing" surfaced in tech-documents accessed by Phoronix, which is the company's contribution to a multi-vendor standard for ray-tracing, being developed by the Khronos Group. This extension could expose several NVIDIA RTX features and presets to Vulkan. It also has similar code-structures to DXR, to minimize duplication of effort, or skill-building. NVIDIA will detail its adaptation of RTX to Vulkan further at GTC.

AMD announced at GDC widened support for Radeon Rays with Unity Lightmapper. Its open-source, high efficiency, high performance GPU-accelerated ray tracing software helps game developers to achieve higher visual quality and stunningly photorealistic 3D images in real-time. Radeon ProRender now supports real-time GPU acceleration of ray tracing techniques mixed with traditional rasterization-based rendering, to combine the value of ray tracing with the interactivity of rasterization.

For gaming, ray tracing is in its early stages. For professional applications, however, real-time ray tracing is a well-established rendering technique. Today, AMD is announcing ProRender support for real-time GPU acceleration of ray tracing techniques mixed with traditional rasterization based rendering. Now built on Vulkan, ProRender is continuing to enable developers to deliver interactive photorealistic graphics. We are actively engaging with professional developers to make real-time visualization a reality.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the release of the Vulkan 1.1 and SPIR-V 1.3 specifications. Version 1.1 expands Vulkan's core functionality with developer-requested features, such as subgroup operations, while integrating a wide range of proven extensions from Vulkan 1.0. Khronos will also release full Vulkan 1.1 conformance tests into open source and AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA and Qualcomm have implemented conformant Vulkan 1.1 drivers. Find more information on the Vulkan 1.1 specification and associated tests and tools at Khronos's Vulkan Resource Page.

"With enhanced developer tools, rigorous conformance testing and the public Vulkan Ecosystem Forum, Khronos is delivering on its goal to develop a complete and vibrant Vulkan ecosystem," said Tom Olson, distinguished engineer at Arm, and Vulkan Working Group chair. "Vulkan 1.1 is a response to prioritized industry requests and shows our commitment to delivering a functional roadmap driven by developer needs."

A Vulkan-compatible driver for macOS and iOS, MoltenVK, is now available free of charge and open-source. Having invested into its development for more than a year, Khronos Group has sponsored The Brenwill Workshop to donate MoltenVK for inclusion in the Vulkan graphics ecosystem.

We've also continued our efforts with LunarG who is today releasing a corresponding update to deliver macOS support to the Vulkan SDK. Also as a result of that work, Dota 2 will soon be updated to target Vulkan on macOS. It's been almost four years since we started contributing to Vulkan's goal of becoming a cross platform solution. With support for Windows, Linux, and Android crossed off the list, this latest set of updates checks off one of the largest remaining targets, giving developers an easy yet robust way to also target their Vulkan-based engines and titles to run on macOS and iOS. By making the code to MoltenVK freely available and open-source, the goal is to enable developers to bring their games to macOS and iOS with minimal development cost.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies creating advanced acceleration standards, announces the release of the Neural Network Exchange Format (NNEF) 1.0 Provisional Specification for universal exchange of trained neural networks between training frameworks and inference engines. NNEF reduces machine learning deployment fragmentation by enabling a rich mix of neural network training tools and inference engines to be used by applications across a diverse range of devices and platforms. The release of NNEF 1.0 as a provisional specification enables feedback from the industry to be incorporated before the specification is finalized - comments and feedback are welcome on the NNEF GitHub repository.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announces from the SIGGRAPH 2017 Conference the immediate public availability of the OpenGL 4.6 specification. OpenGL 4.6 integrates the functionality of numerous ARB and EXT extensions created by Khronos members AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA into core, including the capability to ingest SPIR-V shaders.

SPIR-V is a Khronos-defined standard intermediate language for parallel compute and graphics, which enables content creators to simplify their shader authoring and management pipelines while providing significant source shading language flexibility. OpenGL 4.6 adds support for ingesting SPIR-V shaders to the core specification, guaranteeing that SPIR-V shaders will be widely supported by OpenGL implementations.

In a blog post detailing the release of OpenCL 2.2 with SPIR-V 1.2 integration today, Khronos put in an interesting tidbit, saying that "we are also working to converge with, and leverage, the Khronos Vulkan API - merging advanced graphics and compute into a single API." PC Perspective understandably found this worth further looking into, since as it is phrased, it seems as if OpenCL and Vulkan are going to be slowly developed towards parity (until eventually merging with it.)

Khrono's response to PC Perspective's inquiry was clear enough: "The OpenCL working group has taken the decision to converge its roadmap with Vulkan, and use Vulkan as the basis for the next generation of explicit compute APIs - this also provides the opportunity for the OpenCL roadmap to merge graphics and compute."

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has recently announced plans to form a special working group within its ecosystem, whose mission will be to develop standards for XR (eXtended Reality) products and development. XR envelops both VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality), and VESA has apparently had enough of differing vendor implementations. According to VESA, "the lack of standardization is causing compatibility issues between products from different vendors, as well as increasing the complexity and cost of development, ownership and replacement. Lack of compatibility can also create confusion for end users and impede broader acceptance of AR/VR products."

Considering the XR market's value is expected to hit roughly $162 billion dollars by 2020, we can certainly see how "compatibility issues" and "lower acceptance of AR/VR products" could affect what is looking to be an extremely lucrative market. Let's just gloss over the fact (slightly paradoxical, actually) that we're now looking at two different XR standards groups, VESA's newly-announced initiative, and Khrono's OpenXR.