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.

The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is pleased to announce that the glTF 2.0 Interactivity Extension (KHR_interactivity) specification draft is available for public review and feedback before ratification. This new extension uses behavior graphs, enabling content creators to add logic and behaviors to glTF assets, with a focus on safety, portability and ease of implementation.

The draft specification is now available on the Khronos GitHub page, and the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is seeking input from all members of the glTF community, including content creators, application developers, and digital content creation tool implementers.

In a world where AI, HPC and Safety-Critical acceleration is shifting toward heterogeneous architectures that integrate processors with different architectures from multiple vendors, the need for seamless interoperability and shared open standards has never been more critical. That’s why the UXL Foundation (Unified Acceleration) and the Khronos Group have entered into a liaison agreement to help accelerate the evolution of open accelerated heterogeneous programming.

The new “Honeykrisp” driver is the first conformant Vulkan for Apple hardware on any operating system, implementing the full Vulkan 1.3 Specification without “portability” waivers.

Honeykrisp is not yet released for end users. They’re continuing to add features, improve performance, and port to more hardware. However, source code is available for developers.

The PlayCanvas Editor now has fully integrated support for splats! Learn how to quickly build stunning, interactive 3DGS applications today.

The Khronos Group has released the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper specification and sample implementation. Khronos PBR Neutral is specifically designed to display 3D assets rendered using physically-based rendering (PBR) with true-to-life colors that are vital in applications such as eCommerce, architecture and CAD. The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper is already enjoying wide adoption and support by 3D tools and engines including <model-viewer>, Autodesk, Babylon.js, Blender, Dassault, Filament, London Dynamics, Phasmatic, Three.js, and Threekit.