Khronos royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Machine Learning, and Vision Processing

OpenXR Working Group member, Fred Emmott shares his best practices for OpenXR API Layers on Windows. His latest blog shares 12 tips that will help you avoid common problems, maximize your software’s compatibility, find issues before your users, and simplifying & accelerating debugging.

Pico has announced that their runtime is now officially OpenXR 1.1 compliant, highlighting their commitment to advancing industry standards and delivering seamless interoperability for developers and users. PICO’s OpenXR SDK can be downloaded on their PICO Developer website.

The popular Compiler Explorer (a.k.a. Godbolt) tool now supports SPIR-V as an input. For those who work with SPIR-V disassembly you can now use this tool to quickly play with, validate, and share examples with others. Check out the SPIR-V Optimizer & SPIR-V Validator examples online. More tools such as SPIRV-Cross and SPIRV-Reflect are also in the works .

The Khronos Group has announced the launch of the new Slang™ Initiative. This initiative will oversee and advance the open-source Slang shading language and compiler, building on 15 years of research, development, and deployment experience. Supported by NVIDIA since 2017, Slang has been widely adopted in production projects across the industry.

Slang empowers real-time graphics developers with innovative features that complement existing shading languages, including modular code development, portable deployment to multiple target APIs, and neural computation in graphics shaders. Hosting under multi-company governance at Khronos will enable and foster industry-wide collaboration to drive Slang’s continued evolution.

Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.302, Khronos is proud to announce two new Vulkan Video encode extensions. First, the highly anticipated Encode AV1 extension enhances Vulkan Video by adding AV1 encode functionality to complement its existing AV1 decode support. This milestone means that Vulkan Video now provides full decode AND encode acceleration for the H.264, H.265 and AV1 codec standards. Additionally, the new Encode Quantization Map extension introduces advanced encoding features for all supported codecs to Vulkan Video developers for the first time. We are confident these extensions provide the necessary building blocks for your advanced Vulkan Video applications!

The Khronos Group has announced the agenda and opened registration for Vulkanised 2025, taking place in Cambridge, UK on February 11-13, 2025. The full program is posted on the Vulkanised website, and registration is now open. Early Bird pricing is available until January 10.