API

Khronos: Who knows what the future will hold?

“WorkSpace” by Gamma-Ray Productions is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0   From the organization that stabilized the API wars in 2000 and empowered the extraordinary growth of the smartphone market comes a vision of the future. Khronos has grown to over 180 members in one of the most extraordinary non-profit organizations for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, … Read more

Anari—come together, over me

In November 2019, open standard API developer and harmonizing industry force, Khronos, enthralled developers and users alike with their proposed data visualization initiative to work on a cross-platform analytical rendering API.  Prior to Khronos gathering the SciViz world, developers working in scientific visualization faced a chaotic, waring gaggle of awkward, conflicting, and confusing plug-ins, interfaces, and wannabe APIs. No one … Read more

Vulkan has a new home—and look

The new site has a whole page dedicated to Vulkan tools and support, giving developers access to SDKs, profilers, debuggers, libraries, language bindings, game engines, and frameworks

Khronos and EMVA unite over open camera and sensor API exploration

Khronos and the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), the European industry association for vision technology, announced the formation of an Embedded Camera API Exploratory Group. The group is open to all at no cost for exploring industry interest in the creation of open royalty-free API standards for controlling embedded cameras and sensors. Khronos says there are multiple vectors impinging on … Read more

Meshing around with shaders coming with DirectX Ultimate

In late 2019 Microsoft announced it would make a major upgrade to its Windows API DirectX12. The company said it would add two new shader stages: the Mesh Shader and the Amplification Shader. Mesh shaders incorporate most aspects of Vertex (VS) and Geometry shaders (GS) into one shader stage by processing batches of vertices and primitives before the rasterizer. The … Read more

Visualization for everyone: Khronos starts development of ANARI—an ANAlytic Rendering Interface API

New ANARI API will streamline data visualization   Analytic rendering is image generation performed primarily to gain and communicate insights into complex data sets. Scientific visualization is the primary application domain using analytic rendering today, followed by the emerging data analytics space. Recent advances in rendering technology for image generation—especially the introduction of real-time ray tracing—significantly advanced data visualization and … Read more

Khronos extends and releases Vulkan 1.2 for GPU acceleration

Mount Vulkaan – Wikipedia   The sun never sets on Khronos, and Vulkan never sleeps. Khronos’s Vulkan is also no Rip Van Winkel and since the release of Vulkan 1.1 at Siggraph 2016, over 23 extensions to an already robust API have been suggested to the committee. Those extensions have been accepted bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, … Read more