Vulkan

AI accelerators and open software transform the computing landscape

Three years ago, we had maybe six or less AI accelerators, today there’s over two dozen, and more are coming. One of the first commercially available AI training accelerators was the GPU, and the undisputed leader of that segment was Nvidia. Nvidia was already preeminent in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) applications and adding neural net acceleration was … Read more

XR at Khronos

Driving to stay at least in step, if not ahead of the virtual, mixed, augmented, and yet to be named and marketed realities, the Khronos OpenXR working group has released their working API which covers various OS, and presumably all devices. OpenXR—solving the VR–AR fragmentation if not confusion. (Source: Khronos)   OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides … Read more

And then there were 21—free ray tracing programs

In the process of preparing our 2019 Ray tracing and Rendering report, we have searched for all the ray tracing programs and suppliers we could find. The report is about geometry-based ray tracing and does not embrace field, optical, audio, or other non-3D (virtual or real) ray tracing applications or software. We have identified 71 raytracing programs from integrated to … Read more

Play games on a MacBook? Why not?

Khronos is making that possible. The Khronos Group announced that the Vulkan Working Group's Portability Initiative has been working with Khronos members Valve, LunarG, and The Brenwill Workshop to enable Vulkan applications to be ported to Apple platforms. The Vulkan Portability resource page (https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/portability-initiative) links to a collection of free and open source set of tools, SDKs, and runtime libraries … Read more