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

Leadwerks Game Engine 5.2 has been released, delivering a massive upgrade to its virtual reality capabilities with a new backend built on the OpenXR standard. By leveraging Khronos Group’s royalty-free, open standard, Leadwerks ensures native compatibility with virtually all VR hardware on the market today, including Valve’s new Steam Frame headset.

Many new enhancements for VR have been added including hand and finger animation, high-fidelity physics powered by Newton Dynamics, low-latency hand attachments, and built-in VR locomotion options.

With universal OpenXR integration and its high-fidelity physics system, Leadwerks 5.2 is uniquely positioned as a versatile platform for both indie VR game developers and professional simulation creators, spanning industries from entertainment to aerospace and defense.

The Khronos Group announced the establishment of Khronos AISBL, an international non-profit association headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. Khronos AISBL operates under the governance of The Khronos Group Inc.; membership, IP framework, and specification processes are unchanged. This new entity enables European organizations to include Khronos as a formal project partner in major EU-funded research and innovation programs.

The Khronos Group has issued an RFP for the OpenCL SDK maintenance. The OpenCL SDK is the Khronos-maintained open source collection of OpenCL samples, utility libraries, language bindings, continuous integration (CI) infrastructure, and the OpenCL Guide. It is hosted on GitHub and maintained by the OpenCL Working Group. The goal of this project is to address identified bugs and issues in the SDK and to improve its functionality and usability.

RedGamingTech's Paul Eccleston sits down for this interview with Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett. They discuss a range of topics including Vulkan and the addition of Descriptor Heaps (which will be the new standard rather than the binding model), what the industry have decided around Work Graphs and work lists (especially because DX12 is pushing away from Work Graphs), Neural Rendering.

Neural texture compression, RTX Mega Geometry, neural materials and how the rendering pipeline may change in the long term, including how APIs will evolve for both graphics and other technologies as hardware becomes more powerful and AI models handle more of the workloads in games.

Other subjects include SLANG, Neural rendering and AI, glTF and OpenXR. While Virtual Reality hasn't been embraced so quickly by gamers, VR and Augmented Reality has its place in many other fields, and so technology such as OpenXR is going to be increasingly important.

NVIDIA has added support for VK_NV_low_latency revision 2, to enable out-of-the-box Proton support for NVIDIA Reflex in Vulkan-native games. In addition: 

• Fixed a bug which prevented VK_NV_low_latency2 from reducing latency on swapchains created from VK_KHR_wayland_surface and VK_KHR_display surfaces.
• Fixed multiple startup and alt-tab hangs that occurred with NVIDIA Smooth Motion enabled.
• Fixed a bug that caused a file descriptor leak when the Vulkan loader unloads libGLX_nvidia.so.0 after a call to vkDestroyInstance.
• Added support for the VK_EXT_cluster_acceleration_structure Vulkan extension.

Jagex's RuneScape launched an open beta of its Vulkan renderer on Windows on September 7, replacing OpenGL as the engine transitions for lower CPU overhead, better multi-threading, and improved streaming/loading performance. Android is next, with an eventual Vulkan-to-Metal translation layer for Apple platforms; OpenGL stays as a fallback for incompatible devices.