SIGGRAPH is one of the world’s most significant and long-standing conferences focused on computer graphics and interactive techniques. For the Khronos Group, SIGGRAPH represents an essential opportunity to connect with the developers, engineers, artists, and technical professionals that make up the primary users of Khronos standards like ANARI, glTF, OpenXR, WebGL, and Vulkan.

Through Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, presentations, networking events, and face-to-face member meetings at SIGGRAPH, Khronos shares new and forthcoming technical breakthroughs, gathers feedback, learns about user needs and promotes best practices. This year, Khronos hosted nine public-facing events over four days: Presentation materials and video recordings for these events are now available on the Khronos SIGGRAPH 2024 Event Page.

PyTorch 2.4 now supports Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series and the SYCL software stack, making it easier to speed up your AI workflows for both training and inference. This update allows a consistent programming experience with minimal coding effort and extends PyTorch’s device and runtime capabilities, including device, stream, event, generator, allocator, and guard, to seamlessly support streaming devices. This enhancement simplifies deploying PyTorch on ubiquitous hardware, making it easier for you to integrate different hardware back ends.

Given that more developers were interested in creating applications for the growing number of Windows 11 ARM-based machines, last month LunarG released a Vulkan SDK for Windows 11 ARM64 architectures as a public Beta.

The latest update to Ultra Engine, version 0.9.7, introduces a new decals system built into the clustered forward+ renderer. Decals blend seamlessly with glTF material properties including color, normal, metallic-roughness, and transparency. Particle emitters are now implemented, as well as per-entity emission color and texture offsets for easy control of conveyer belts, tank treads, and other texture-scrolling effects. Ultra Engine continues to leverage Khronos technologies to provide up to 10x faster framerates for games and VR applications. Find out about other features included in the latest Ultra Engine release.

The Vulkan Working Group has released the VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension, enabling direct retrieval of binary data associated with individual pipelines, bypassing the VkPipelineCache mechanism, and enabling applications to explicitly manage pipeline caching. Applications that do not need the advanced functionality of the new VK_KHR_pipeline_binary extension can continue to use VkPipelineCache objects for their simplicity and optimized implementation. But developers that are not satisfied with the VkPipelineCache API should read on to learn more about this powerful new approach.

On June 21, 2024 the Vulkan SC working group at the Khronos Group released the Vulkan SC 1.0.15 specification, the latest maintenance update to the “Vulkan Safety Critical” open standard API, which enables GPU-accelerated graphics and computation to be deployed in systems that are certified to meet industry functional safety standards.

This blog post is on the latest Vulkan SC developments, including significant new functionality in the Vulkan SC validation layers and broadened availability of NVIDIA Vulkan SC drivers.

In this Collabora blog post, Eric Smith details how the Panthor kernel driver and Mesa Panfrost driver combination are now officially conformant for OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali-G610 (a chip in the 10th generation of Mali, aka “v10” or “Valhall”). This required passing tens of thousands of conformance test cases. Passing these tests gives hardware implementers and software adopters assurance that the driver is basically sound. This doesn’t mean that Panthor and Panfrost are bug-free, of course. Software being software, there are always bugs! It does mean that it’s unlikely that there are major issues remaining. Users can be confident that programs using OpenGL ES 3.1 will “just work” on the tested version of Mesa (24.1.1).

The Broadcom V3DV driver living within the Mesa code-base that provides Vulkan API support most notably for Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers now advertises Vulkan 1.3 and has been successfully tested on both the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 boards.

The open-source Intel “ANV” Vulkan driver within Mesa is now more capable for its Vulkan Video support with the H.264 and H.265 encode support now wired up for Mesa 24.3.

The recently completed MPEG-I Scene Description ISO/IEC 23090 standard builds on glTF 2.0 using the MPEG vendor extension framework. The need for a flexible and dynamic scene description solution for immersive experiences had been identified early in the process of specifying technologies for immersive media in MPEG. In looking for a solution to this gap, MPEG reviewed existing technologies to identify formats with a history of being successfully deployed and widely used. The group then evaluated whether one of these formats would satisfy the identified requirements, or whether a new format needs to be defined from scratch. glTF stood out as an exemplary option.

In a glTF meet-up presentation, Khronos members shared the use cases and requirements that lead to choosing glTF, and detailed the architecture of the extensions. This blog summarizes that presentation, explaining the journey to incorporating glTF 2.0 into MPEG-I scene description and how content creators and developers can begin using this new standard to develop interactive real-time applications.

In a collaborative effort between Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) members Pixar, Autodesk, and Adobe, we are excited to announce experimental support for the Vulkan API through the HgiVulkan backend, available in OpenUSD 24.08. OpenUSD is a high-performance, extensible software platform for collaboratively creating, editing, and simulating complex 3D scenes.This allows developers to start leveraging Vulkan in Storm or other Hgi-based renderers.

ANARI is the industry’s open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API developed by the Khronos Group to provide portable access to sophisticated 3D functionality including ray tracing and global illumination. ANARI is already widely used by scientific visualization applications and is implemented over multiple rendering engines, including AMD’s RadeonProRender, Intel’s OSPRay, and NVIDIA’s VisRTX, among others. ANARI is developed with full public access to the specification and has recently incorporated significant community feedback, including improvements to the object interface, better error handling through guaranteed API stream robustness, revamped runtime feature queries, directly mapped array parameters, improved volume shading, and compatibility with the Khronos glTF Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials.

Ultra Engine 0.9.6 introduces a new foliage system using GLSL compute shaders for efficient rendering of dense forests. The engine makes extensive use of Khronos’ glTF file format and PBR rendering reference code. Ultra Engine leverages Khronos technologies to provide up to 10x faster framerates for games and VR applications. Find out about other features included in the latest Ultra Engine release.

In this Rastergrid article, they write about the secret sauce behind the Vulkan SC Ecosystem components that enabled them to leverage the industry-proven Vulkan Ecosystem components to provide corresponding developer tooling for the safety-critical variant of the Vulkan API.

After Effects 24.5 continues Adobe’s ongoing overhaul of the software’s 3D toolset. Changes include the option to import 3D models with embedded animations, originally rolled out in beta in April, and now available in the stable release. Animation support is currently restricted to files in glTF/GLB format.