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.

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.

AMD announced the AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU, built with the latest AMD RDNA 2 architecture which delivers high-performance GPU acceleration for today's demanding cloud workloads including immersive AAA game experiences, intensive 3D workloads and modern office productivity applications at scale in the cloud.

With its innovative GPU-partitioning capabilities, multi-stream hardware accelerated encoders and 32 GB GDDR6 memory, the AMD Radeon PRO V620 offers dedicated GPU resources that scale to multiple graphics users, helping ensure cost-effective graphics acceleration for a range of workloads. Built using the same GPU architecture that powers the latest generation game consoles and PC game experiences, the AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU is also designed to develop and deliver immersive AAA game experiences.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, publicly releases the OpenCL 3.0 Provisional Specifications. OpenCL 3.0 realigns the OpenCL roadmap to enable developer-requested functionality to be broadly deployed by hardware vendors, and it significantly increases deployment flexibility by empowering conformant OpenCL implementations to focus on functionality relevant to their target markets. OpenCL 3.0 also integrates subgroup functionality into the core specification, ships with a new OpenCL C 3.0 language specification, uses a new unified specification format, and introduces extensions for asynchronous data copies to enable a new class of embedded processors. The provisional OpenCL 3.0 specifications enable the developer community to provide feedback on GitHub before the specifications and conformance tests are finalized.

In an almost absolutely non-shocking move, Adobe has declared their Shockwave software plugin for accelerating web content to be going the way of the dodo when it comes to official support. The move follows the internet's advancement, where HTML5 and WebGL have superseded the usage of the proprietary Shockwave solution. A more open approach means there are a whole lot more players working on and paying attention to others' mistakes, and means there are a much higher number of developers working with the tools at any one timer than Adobe ever could dedicate engineers to.

Following its statement on Shockwave being dead, Adobe pulled the downloads from their website, meaning that no additional versions or downloads of the software are coming from the company itself. Enterprise customers won't be left hanging, with a grace period of support from Adobe with new security updates for the remainder of their contracts. Current Shockwave-based content's future is unclear, but some content is bound to become inaccessible to most users.

After putting in work in the OpenGL, WebGL, and most recently, Vulkan APIs, the technology industry consortium Khronos Group is setting its sights on the VR industry and ecosystems. Their aim: to create a "cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard" for the VR development community. This move is an effort to prevent the VR system from fragmenting itself towards an eventual collapse, considering the multiple engines to create content, platforms to sell that content through, and a few different hardware options with casuistically different requirements and tool-sets. As a result, for a developer to support SteamVR (OpenVR), Oculus (OVR), and OSVR, it has a lot of work to do, since each platform (with its unique runtime) interfaces with the game engine in a different way. Developers must account for the intricacies of each platform during the development process.

Valve announces a number of product and technologies at this week's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. "We continue to see very strong growth in PC Gaming, with Steam growing 50% in the last 12 months," said Gabe Newell, Valve's president. "With these announcements we hope that we are helping build on that momentum."

Steam Machines, Windows PCs, Macs, and Linux PCs will be able to take advantage of a new product announced at GDC called Steam Link. Designed to extend your Steam experience to any room in the house, Steam Link allows you to stream all your Steam content from any PC or Steam Machine on the same home network. Supporting 1080p at 60Hz with low latency, Steam Link will be available this November for $49.99, and available with a Steam Controller for an additional $49.99 in the US (worldwide pricing to be released closer to launch).

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, today announced growing industry support for the OpenGL family of 3D standards that are advancing the visual experience for more than two billion mobile devices and PCs sold each year. OpenGL, OpenGL ES and WebGL are the world's most widely deployed APIs that between them provide portable access to graphics and compute capabilities across multiple platforms, including Android, iOS, Linux, OS X, Windows and the Web.

OpenGL ES 3.1 Conformant Implementations
In July, the first wave of leading GPU vendors, including ARM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, NVIDIA and Vivante, achieved full conformance with the latest version of OpenGL ES. A conformance submission from Qualcomm is currently under review, with more to follow. The OpenGL ES 3.1 specification was released in March 2014 and provides the most desired features of desktop OpenGL, including GPU Compute shaders, in a standard that is suitable for mobile devices. Khronos launched the OpenGL ES 3.1 Adopters program in June, including a broad set of conformance tests to ensure reliable cross-vendor operation. More information is here.

Opera Software today released the beta version of Opera 12, codenamed "Wahoo", the latest entry in Opera's long line of desktop web browsers. Opera 12 is both smarter and faster than its predecessors and introduces new features for both developers and consumers to play with ahead of the final launch. Discover Opera 12 for yourself at www.opera.com/browser/next/.

It's a theme, not a meme

Themes give you an easy way to change the look of Opera to suit your tastes or your mood. Just select a new theme and - voila! - your new-look browser awaits. To try a theme for Opera 12 beta, visit addons.opera.com/themes.

You know what, we won't even go through the drill of expressing surprise that a new major version of Firefox is released on a nearly-monthly basis. Mozilla released Firefox 8.0, about 7 months after it released Firefox 4.0. And they look similar, except that the new one looks more polished. Granted, drastic UI changes can hit users' learning curve and preferences. The new UI sports essentially the same layout as its predecessors since version 4.0, but the elements look designed better, fused into the theme. It's the under-the-hood changes that are counting. Mozilla would never pack so many background changes to the monthly updates of Firefox 3.DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 8.0

With this release, Mozilla Firefox has the following changes over the previous generation:

The Khronos Group released the final WebGL 1.0 specification to enable hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in HTML5 Web browsers without the need for plug-ins. WebGL defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 to allow rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the industry-standard OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics APIs. WebGL has the support of major silicon and browser vendors including Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera with multiple browsers already shipping with WebGL implementations including the beta releases for Mozilla Firefox 4.0, all channels of Google Chrome 9.0, an Opera preview build, and Apple Mac OS Safari nightly builds.

WebGL leverages the pervasive availability of OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics on almost all browser-capable desktop, mobile and embedded platforms and the recent developments in Web technology including the massive increases in JavaScript performance. The ability for Web developers to directly access OpenGL-class graphics directly from JavaScript, and freely mix 3D with other HTML content, will enable a new wave of innovation in Web gaming, educational and training applications and graphically rich user interfaces to make the Web more enjoyable, productive and intuitive.