Beaverton, OR – August 06, 2025 – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced that the inaugural Shading Languages Symposium, will take place on February 12-13, 2026, in San Diego, California. The symposium will bring together developers, implementors, researchers, and technical artists to explore the current state and future development of shading languages and real-time rendering technologies. The open call for submissions for the symposium closes on October 12, 2025.

Co-located with and running immediately after Vulkanised 2026, the symposium will focus on the evolving landscape of shading languages and the emerging technologies and rendering paradigms that are shaping the next generation of graphics programming.The symposium is expected to cover a wide range of shading languages, including, but not limited to: GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language), HLSL (Microsoft’s High Level Shading Language), MSL (Metal Shading Language), OSL (Open Shading Language), Slang, SPIR-V (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation for shaders) and WGSL (WebGPU Shading Language).

Organized by the Khronos Group, the event has already confirmed the opening keynote and invited talks from some of the shader ecosystem’s leading experts and representing a wide range of shading languages.

• GLSL and 20+ Years of Shading Languages - Randi Rost (Consultant), opening keynote 
• HLSL - Chris Bieneman (Microsoft)
• OSL - A Shading Language for Film Rendering - Chris Kulla (Epic Games) 
• Slang - Shannon Woods (NVIDIA)
• SPIR-V - Diego Novillo (NVIDIA)
• WGSL - Dan Sinclair (Google)

Call for Submissions

The public Call for Submissions is now open and invites members of the shading community to submit talks that showcase the use, integration or implementation of shading languages for graphics and compute, including but not limited to their use in real-time graphics, VFX, offline rendering and ray tracing, Physical Based Rendering (PBR), web graphics, scientific visualization, machine learning, custom effects, AR/VR/XR and benchmarking, and more ... 

Talks can address issues around the use of the shading language APIs, shader best practices, SDKs and development frameworks, profiling and debugging tools, cross-platform portability, learning to program shaders, and more.

The organisers are particularly interested in submissions that present case studies that share insights into novel approaches to using shading languages in real-world applications, games, research and teaching, and covering any genre or application domain.

Submissions are due by October 12, 2025, with notifications expected in November.

The symposium is an in-person event and accepted presentations will be featured at the symposium and published online following the event. 

"This symposium represents a significant milestone for the graphics programming community," said Neil Trevett, president, Khronos Group. "As shading languages continue to evolve and new rendering paradigms emerge, bringing together the brightest minds in the field will accelerate innovation and collaboration."

For more information, detailed submission guidelines, and registration updates, visit the official website: https://www.khronos.org/events/shading-languages-symposium-2026.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of close to 200 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, metaverse, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, Kamaros®, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, Slang™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

SIGGRAPH Asia, Tokyo, Japan – December 3, 2024 – Today, the Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies dedicated to creating advanced interoperability standards, has announced the release of Vulkan® 1.4, the latest version of its cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. Vulkan 1.4 integrates and mandates support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms.

“Vulkan 1.4 is a developer-driven update that enhances Vulkan's value as a stable, reliable framework for creating graphics-intensive applications on any platform,” said Tom Olson, outgoing Vulkan Working Group Chair. “As I step down, I'm proud to see the groundwork we’ve laid through our roadmaps come to fruition. Our roadmap milestone plans have empowered developers with new levels of flexibility and performance, setting Vulkan on a path for continued innovation and broader adoption in the years to come.” 

The Vulkan 1.4 specification consolidates numerous previously optional extensions, features, and increased minimum hardware limits, many of which were defined in the Vulkan Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones and associated profiles, including:

• Streaming Transfers: Vulkan 1.4 imposes new implementation requirements to ensure portable, cross-platform applications can stream large quantities of data to a device while simultaneously rendering at full performance.
• Previously optional extensions and features critical to emerging high-performance applications are now mandatory in Vulkan 1.4, ensuring their reliable availability across multiple platforms. These include push descriptors, dynamic rendering local reads, and scalar block layouts.
• Maintenance extensions up to and including VK_KHR_maintenance6 are now part of the core Vulkan 1.4 specification.
• 8K rendering with up to eight separate render targets is now guaranteed to be supported, along with several other limit increases.

“Vulkan 1.4 is a milestone release that directly brings long-requested features and proven extensions into the core standard. By mandating these capabilities, we are enhancing Vulkan’s flexibility and performance across a wider range of devices, making it easier for developers to create cutting-edge applications with confidence that they will run reliably on any platform," said Ralph Potter, newly elected Vulkan Working Group Chair.

The Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) is an extensive set of close to three million tests in open source that all Vulkan implementers must pass, increasing cross-platform consistency. AMD, Arm, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Samsung all have development drivers that have passed Vulkan 1.4 Conformance. Additionally, Mesa open-source Linux drivers have passed Vulkan 1.4 conformance on AMD, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm hardware. Production drivers that have passed Khronos’s formal conformance testing process are listed on the Vulkan Conformant Products register.

Vulkan's tooling ecosystem continues to grow, providing developers with powerful, community-driven tools that improve shader portability and performance. The Vulkan SDK from LunarG supports multiple shader languages, including HLSL, GLSL, and Slang—now a Khronos-hosted open-source project—enabling developers to use the shading language that best suits their technical and commercial requirements. The Vulkan SDK will be updated to include support for version 1.4 in January 2025.

The Khronos Vulkan Working Group welcomes feedback about Vulkan 1.4 on GitHub Vulkan-Docs. Developers are also encouraged to join the Vulkan Discord channel and other support forums at vulkan.org.

Learn more about Vulkan

Khronos will host a Vulkan BOF (Birds of a Feather) meeting at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 on Thursday, December 5, 2024, at 3:30 p.m. local time in Tokyo. For details, see Khronos @ SIGGRAPH Asia.

Developers are invited to attend Vulkanised 2025, taking place February 11–13 in Cambridge, UK. Vulkanised is the premier conference and meetup dedicated to the Vulkan API, bringing together the developer community to exchange ideas, tackle challenges, and shape the future of this important open standard and its ecosystem.

Industry Support

"Vulkan 1.4 brings implementations across the industry to greater feature parity, requiring several features that AMD hardware has supported since Vulkan 1.0, as well as a number of newer features from the Vulkan 2022 and 2024 roadmap milestones that will help improve the developer experience. AMD intends to support Vulkan 1.4 in a release of our AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition™ driver early next year," said Andrej Zdravkovic, senior vice president and chief software officer, AMD.

"To meet growing consumer demand for premium mobile experiences, developers need the right tools to create more complex applications,” said Geraint North, vice president, developer platforms at Arm. “The Vulkan 1.4 release represents a significant step forward, with new features translating to improved ease of use for developers. Arm remains committed to empowering developers with the tools and technologies needed to create the next generation of graphics and compute applications, and we are pleased to support Vulkan 1.4 across Arm Immortalis and Mali GPUs.”

"Imagination is excited by the new 1.4 core release of Vulkan and its benefits to developers using all our current GPU generations,” said Ed Plowman, vice president of innovation at Imagination Technologies. "Vulkan 1.4 improves the programming experience across all the diverse market segments Imagination supports, from deeply-embedded GPUs to the most performant cutting-edge solutions that build upon Vulkan 1.4 to drive innovation with the Vulkan roadmap profiles." 

We look forward to bringing Vulkan 1.4 support to millions of Intel Arc™ Graphics and Intel Graphics platforms early next year,” said Lisa Pearce, CVP and GM of GPU and NPU HW/SW IPs at Intel. “The Vulkan 1.4 specification builds on the Roadmap 2022 and 2024 milestones to integrate key features into the core standard, giving developers a new powerful tool to deliver the next generation of graphics applications across a variety of platforms.”

“Vulkan 1.4 makes it easier than ever for developers to create and deploy GPU-accelerated applications,” said Thiru Sinnathamby, vice president of software engineering at NVIDIA. “Today, NVIDIA is shipping conformant drivers with support for Vulkan 1.4 plus full Roadmap 2024 milestone functionality on Windows 10, Windows 11, and Linux, all supported by our updated Nsight Graphics tools."

"We are delighted by the release of Vulkan 1.4. The latest iteration of the Vulkan API improves usability and provides a more consistent developer experience to provide the most efficient way of processing high fidelity graphics across a wide range of platforms. We look forward to bringing Vulkan 1.4 to our Samsung Galaxy devices, and to supporting developers in creating great experiences for our customers," said Sungdo Moon, EVP & head of system R&D, Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics.

About Vulkan

Vulkan is an open, royalty-free graphics and compute API designed for high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs. It is widely adopted in leading game engines, cutting-edge games, and high-performance applications. Vulkan is supported across a diverse range of devices, including Windows and Linux PCs, gaming consoles, cloud platforms, mobile phones, and embedded systems.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 150 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, machine learning, spatial computing, augmented and virtual reality, and parallel computing. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, Kamaros™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, Slang™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

Beaverton, OR – November 21, 2024 – The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry leaders in interoperability standards, 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. 

“Slang is now a significant shading language option for graphics developers everywhere, as all are enabled to directly influence and participate in its ongoing development,” said Neil Trevett, president of The Khronos Group and vice president developer ecosystems, NVIDIA. “Khronos’s innovative Slang governance structure blends open-source development agility with the patent safeguards of open standards. Slang is freely available for any platform or API to use, including Khronos, which will leverage Slang in the Vulkan ecosystem while ensuring SPIR-V remains responsive to Slang’s requirements."

“NVIDIA will continue its longstanding investment in Slang, which is designed to meet the needs of today’s graphics developers while paving the way for the neural graphics revolution,” said Nicholas Haemel, vice president of graphics and system software, NVIDIA. “With Slang in open governance at Khronos, the graphics community can collaboratively advance and harness the advantages of cross-platform support, scalable graphics systems, reduced compile times, and enhanced modularity.”

Fostering Open Industry Collaboration 

Khronos has established a unique governance model to ensure Slang remains open and responsive to developers. Hosted on GitHub and licensed under Apache 2.0, the Slang open-source project will follow best practices for technical development while fostering an active, self-governing contributor community. Contributors can influence language design, improve the codebase, and address bugs, with opportunities to earn elevated rights within the project—independent of Khronos membership.

The associated Slang working group, composed of Khronos members, provides financial, logistical, and marketing support to the open-source project, offering strategic guidance while enabling Slang engineering work to remain agile. Together, the open-source project and the working group form the Slang Initiative.

The Slang open-source project will develop a rigorous language specification alongside the compiler, ensuring clarity, and architectural consistency backward compatibility,for developers. This specification will be periodically ratified by the Slang Working Group to provide patent license protection under the Khronos Intellectual Property Framework.

Slang’s Value to Developers

Slang is designed to address the evolving needs of real-time graphics developers, especially those working with large-scale shader codebases. By supporting modular development with features like modules, interfaces, and generics, Slang simplifies shader creation and maintenance while significantly reducing compilation times.

Many developers must currently rewrite shader code to run on multiple target APIs and platforms or use complex translation or recompilation toolchains. The Slang compiler directly supports multiple backend targets for portable code deployment across diverse APIs and platforms, including SPIR-V for Vulkan, HLSL for Direct3D, GLSL for OpenGL, WGSL for WebGPU, and Metal Shading Language for Apple platforms. For example, Autodesk uses Slang in the Aurora path tracing renderer to enable a single-source ray tracing codebase.

The Slang compiler enables ingestion of existing HLSL and GLSL shader codebases for developers who wish to incrementally migrate to Slang’s modern language features. For example, Valve compiled the entire production Source 2 HLSL codebase with Slang while modifying only 10 lines of code.

Slang supports automatic differentiation as a first-class language feature, making it ideal for integrating neural computation into graphics shaders. Slang can automatically generate both forward- and backward-derivative propagation code for complex functions to easily make existing rendering codebases differentiable, or to use Slang as the kernel language in a PyTorch-driven machine learning framework via slangtorch. For example, Slang is used in the Slang.D Gaussian Splatting Rasterizer, a unified platform for real-time, inverse, and differentiable rendering which can compile to rendering code for diverse platforms.

Slang Enhances the Khronos Standards Ecosystem

Establishing Slang as a modern shading language, actively maintained and shaped by the community, greatly enriches the Khronos standards ecosystem. Designed to empower developers, Slang broadens the choice of available shading languages to address diverse needs and drive innovation across the industry.

Slang will provide timely access to new API functionality, including the latest Vulkan features, and is available as one of the shading language options in the Vulkan SDK. As a "client" language, Slang will also actively contribute to the evolution of the SPIR-V intermediate representation, thereby benefiting the broader standards-based compiler ecosystem.

Get Involved

As part of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 conference in Tokyo on December 4th, Khronos will host a Birds of a Feather Session titled "Slang and the 3D Shading Language Landscape" that will explore the role of Slang in the landscape of 3D shading languages, how it complements languages like GLSL and HLSL, and how Slang enables shader portability across multiple platforms, including PCs, the web, cloud environments, mobile devices, and Apple platforms.

The Slang open-source project warmly welcomes participation by any interested developers to join the Slang Discord and contribute to the public Slang GitHub repository, where they can submit pull requests, RFCs, bug reports, and more. A Slang overview slide deck is available for download, and more information on Slang can be found at https://shader-slang.org/.

Industry Support for Slang

“We’re excited to see Slang maturing, gaining industry momentum, and transitioning to open governance under Khronos—a major advancement for the developer community. Within Adobe’s 3D & Immersive division, we’re actively exploring Slang as part of our unified rasterization and path-tracing renderer, recognizing its potential as a versatile, unified shading language. With its expressive syntax and modern design, Slang offers real promise in streamlining complex shading workflows, and we’re enthusiastic about its potential role in advancing our rendering pipeline,” said Francois Beaune, director of rendering for 3D&I, Adobe.

“We see great benefits with Slang in reducing code complexity and maintenance overhead across APIs, as well as in unlocking potential for future neural graphics capabilities. We welcome Slang’s transition to an open, multi-company governance model under Khronos and believe this will greatly benefit the shading language ecosystem and the graphics industry as a whole,” said Henrik Edstrom, distinguished architect, graphics, Autodesk.

“The global landscape requires an open shading language that allows developers and researchers to innovate in graphics without constraints and with high efficiency. Slang builds on the accomplishments of existing languages while offering novel solutions to the challenges we face in the realm of modern graphics development,” said Billy Khan, director of engine technology, id Software.

“Establishing open governance and standardizing Slang - an already portable, multiplatform shader language - is crucial for its widespread industry adoption. With over 20 years of experience in open-source development and standards, Igalia is proud to contribute our expertise to help establish Slang as an industry standard through this collaborative initiative,” said Samuel Iglesias, coordinator of the GPU driver development team at Igalia.

“The process of getting our large HLSL shader codebase working with Slang went extremely smoothly. We were able to integrate Slang into the Source 2 engine and ship the generated SPIR-V into production on multiple titles, including Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, with minimal changes to our shaders. After completing the initial integration, we have since adopted some of the advanced features of Slang, such as BufferPointer, enumerants, interfaces, and generics. We are very thankful for NVIDIA offering Slang to the open-source community and believe ongoing contributions from multiple companies within Khronos will help ensure a healthy future for Slang,” said Dan Ginsburg, software developer, Valve.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of close to 200 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free interoperability standards for 3D graphics, metaverse, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration, and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, Kamaros™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, Slang™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

Beaverton, OR – November 18, 2025 – The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating graphics and compute interoperability standards, has announced the agenda and opened registration for Vulkanised 2025, taking place in Cambridge, UK on February 11-13, 2025.

Vulkanised is the largest annual event dedicated to developers using Vulkan, the next-gen graphics and compute API that enables high-efficiency, cross-platform GPU access. Vulkanised is a unique opportunity for Vulkan developers to gather, share ideas, solve problems, and help steer the future development of the Vulkan API and ecosystem.

Vulkanised 2025 includes over 30 sessions covering a wide array of topics, including application case studies, in-depth technical talks, future-focused keynotes, panel discussions and lively networking sessions featuring leading researchers and practitioners in the graphics development industry. 

The full program is posted on the Vulkanised website, and registration is open now. Early Bird pricing is available until January 10, and additional academic discounts are available. View the full event details and register at https://vulkan.org/events/vulkanised-2025.

Vulkanised is organized by the Khronos Group and made possible by the support of Platinum sponsors ARM, LunarG, NVIDIA, Samsung, and VeriSilicon.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 150 industry-leading companies creating royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel computation, vision processing and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

VRM, proposed by Shinnosuke Iwaki, the Technical Committee Chair of VRM Consortium, is a platform-independent 3D avatar standard designed for interoperability in the metaverse era. First released in Japan in 2018, VRM has supported diverse applications and services, including the metaverse communication service “VirtualCast,” 3D character creation software “VRoid Studio,” and the metaverse platform “cluster.” It has already become the de facto industry standard for avatar integration across platforms within Japan.

In January of this year, the VRM Consortium and The Khronos Group entered into a liaison agreement to further the adoption of VRM. Since then, the two parties have been actively sharing information related to glTF and VRM. Now, both parties are moving forward to consolidate and propose VRM functionality as official Khronos glTF extensions. glTF extensibility provides a powerful mechanism to extend the core glTF format, with extensions ratified by Khronos often being widely adopted and included in future versions of the glTF core specification. Successful ratification of VRM extensions by Khronos would therefore elevate recognition of VRM both in Japan and the metaverse industry globally, encouraging broader service and platform support for VRM avatars.

Ratification by Khronos would also mark a significant milestone on the path to international standardization for VRM. glTF 2.0 is an ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 12113:2022); VRM’s inclusion as Khronos glTF Ratified Extensions will open the door for VRM to gain international recognition as an ISO/IEC standard. Adoption by Khronos, and ultimately ISO/IEC, will ensure the long-term continuity and stability of VRM, enabling users, creators, and developers to use it with confidence.

Through the international standardization of VRM functionality in glTF, the VRM Consortium and Khronos are committed to encouraging metaverse interoperability and creating an environment that fosters greater progress for the global metaverse industry. Learn more at VRM-consortium.org and www.khronos.org.

About VRM

VRM is a platform-independent 3D avatar file format originating from Japan, designed to enable interoperability in the metaverse era. In addition to traditional 3D model data such as textures and bones, VRM can handle information necessary for first-person avatar control, such as gaze settings. It aims to standardize varying scales and coordinate systems across different environments, allowing 3D avatars to be used seamlessly on any platform. Taking into account the nature of avatars and how people use them to bring out their personalities, avatar-specific licenses can be embedded into the VRM file, such as whether others can use the avatar or whether it can be used in violent representations. Currently, version 1.0 of VRM is available.

About the VRM Consortium

General incorporated association aimed at the formulation and promotion of the 3D avatar file format VRM.

Name: VRM Consortium, Inc.
Established: April 24, 2019
Location: 4-12-15 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Subject matter:

1. Formulation of VRM, a unified standard for 3D avatar models
2. Collection and provision of information related to VRM
3. Promotion and advertising of VRM　
4. Proposal and development of legal protection for 3D models created with VRM
5. Communication and cooperation with internal and external organizations related to VRM　
6. Activities necessary to achieve the association’s objectives beyond those listed in the preceding items

Board of Directors:

Official Website:
https://vrm-consortium.org/

Membership Application and Inquiries:
VRM Consortium Secretariat
E-mail: vrmc-pr@vrm-consortium.org

VRM Consortium Contact:
VRM Consortium Secretariat
E-mail: vrmc-pr@vrm-consortium.org

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 180 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, metaverse, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration and machine learning. Khronos activities include glTF™, OpenXR™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

Beaverton, OR – June 26, 2024 – The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards for 3D graphics, XR, parallel programming, vision acceleration, and machine learning, will be hosting an in-person meetup and mixer in Seattle the evening of September 12, 2024.

The meetup will feature the latest updates on OpenXR™ implementations, applications, and ecosystem developments, as well as case studies from industry experts. Attendees will have the opportunity to exchange ideas, solve development challenges, and influence the future direction of OpenXR and the broader XR ecosystem.

Khronos has issued a public call for submissions to seek proposals for lightning talks and demos. The goal is to engage experts from the XR community to share their insights and experiences using OpenXR. The Call for Submissions is open today, and the deadline for submissions is July 31, 2024.

For more information about the OpenXR Live: Seattle Meetup or to submit a proposal, please visit OpenXR Live 2024. The deadline is July 31, 2024.

OpenXR Live 2024 is organized by the Khronos Group, the open, non-profit member-driven consortium that creates a wide range of advanced, royalty-free standards including OpenXR, Vulkan®, OpenGL®, and WebGL™.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 180 industry-leading companies creating royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel computation, vision processing and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

Beaverton, OR – May 16, 2024 – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating graphics and compute interoperability standards, 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.

Khronos PBR Neutral enables faithful reproduction of a product’s base color, hue and saturation when using PBR rendering under grayscale lighting, while eliminating HDR artifacts around highlights. It complements tone mappers such as ACES, which are intended for use with other types of content such as images with wide input color gamuts, or are used to achieve stylized artistic looks used in the film, visual effects, and gaming industries.

Tone mapping is often omitted in pipelines that struggle to accurately render the color of assets, but this does not work well with content using HDR or physical lighting. Artists using Khronos PBR Neutral can expect the output of any end-point PBR-based renderer that has adopted the tone mapper specification to faithfully reproduce desired base and brand colors. Khronos PBR Neutral is designed to be simple to implement and fast to run. The sample implementation contains just 13 lines of GLSL shading language code. The specification also supports analytical inversion of the tone mapping function.

While initially developed to support workflows based on the Khronos glTF™ 3D asset format, the Khronos Neutral Tone Mapper is file format-agnostic. The tone mapper currently supports output to sRGB, and Khronos aims to expand support for additional outputs in future releases. Khronos is also discussing future glTF exposure controls to support precise setting of real-world lighting values that can be essential for accurate display of asset colors.

“A common pain point in 3D content creation is achieving vivid, real-life colors for 3D objects using physically-based rendering. The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper enables everyone in the content production pipeline to create and display accurate, photorealistic models.” Emmett Lalish, staff software engineer, Google and Khronos Group glTF and 3D Commerce Working Group member.

Khronos has released the Khronos PBR Neutral specification into open source and welcomes community feedback and suggestions for future enhancements via the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper GitHub repository. Content creators, artists, implementers, and engine developers are encouraged to test the Khronos PBR Neutral sample implementation interactively using their own glTF assets and lighting to determine if it is a good fit for their use case and report feedback and issues on GitHub.

An interactive comparison of various tone mappers, including Khronos PBR Neutral, is available at https://tone-mapping.glitch.me/. The Khronos glTF Sample Viewer also supports Khronos PBR Neutral under ‘Advanced Controls, Tone Map’.

Anyone interested in additional information on the background, design goals and implementation details of Khronos PBR Neutral is encouraged to read the Tone Mapping Considerations for Physically-Based Rendering article by Google staff software engineer Emmett Lalish.

Khronos hosted a free webinar, “How to Achieve True-to-Life 3D Color Rendering with the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper”  on Thursday May 30, 2024. View Slides and Video.

The Need for PBR Neutral Tone Mapping

One of the challenges of displaying true-to-life assets using traditional filmic tone mappers such as ACES is the limited range of reachable colors, especially when outputting bright yellow, green, or cyan hues to an sRGB screen such as a standard computer monitor or mobile device. As a result, 3D objects displayed with filmic tone mapping can appear washed out. Artists often address this problem by not applying a tone mapper at all. This can improve saturation but introduces problems such as hue skew, visual artifacts, or loss of dimension for shiny objects.

Modeled leather, wood, and fabric couch shown with three tone mappers. Left to right: linear, ACES, and Khronos PBR Neutral. The linear mapping rendering is more “washed-out” than ACES; and PBR Neutral shows richer and more visually-true colors.

Modeled leather, wood, and fabric couch shown with three tone mappers. Left to right: linear, ACES, and Khronos PBR Neutral. The linear mapping rendering is more “washed-out” than ACES; and Khronos PBR Neutral shows richer and more visually-true colors.

The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper is intended to provide a 1:1 match for colors up to a certain maximum value, with the remainder used as headroom for compressed highlights. This approach allows content creators to preserve base color, texture, and dimension. The following diagram compares the reachable colors for Khronos PBR Neutral versus the popular ACES filmic tone mapper. The cube represents the [0, 1] space in linear light - no sRGB curve has been applied.

Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper reachable colors

ACES Tone Mapper reachable colors

The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper gives artists a new option for creating assets tuned to application needs. Khronos PBR Neutral, linear, and filmic tone mapping each have distinct use cases and advantages:

• Linear tone mapping (i.e. “no tone mapper applied”) works well for models with no HDR input or physical lighting.
• Filmic tone mapping (e.g. ACES, AgX) should be used in strongly HDR scenes, applications with wide input color gamuts, or to achieve specific artistic looks.
• Khronos PBR Neutral is designed for photorealistic physically-based rendering with well-exposed scenes, precise sRGB base color reproduction under grayscale lighting, and un-opinionated representation under colored light such as sunlight.

Removing the Guesswork from Content Creation

The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper makes it possible to verify a 3D object’s base color independently from the lighting environment, an approach that has advantages for artists, brands, and end users:

• Reduced Guesswork: Artists can verify color values in the texture file; the “guess and check” process of creating a model and testing color output in the final render is eliminated.
• Shorter QA Cycles: The chance of finding color issues in a finished model is reduced, resulting in less rework and fewer delays.
• Faster Updates: An object’s colors can be quickly and easily updated in the asset file without extensive additional QA.
• Flexibility: Marketing and graphic design professionals can vary the lighting environment to achieve their desired look without needing to adjust the base model colors to maintain color fidelity.

Industry Adoption

At launch, the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper has been embraced by popular 3D web, mobile, and cross-platform glTF PBR renderers, including Filament, Babylon.js, <model-viewer>, and Three.js.

Khronos is working with 3D authoring tool vendors to include native support, and Blender 4.2 Alpha users can already start testing the Khronos PBR Neutral view transform within Blender itself.

An OpenColorIO configuration file (config.ocio) defining an approximation of this tone mapper is included in the specification as a sample implementation to assist authors in trying out the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper within their existing workflows.

Industry Support

"Tone mapping has been a significant challenge in many content creation pipelines, especially within the eCommerce sector. The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper effectively addresses some of these challenges, offering users a compelling option, especially for workflows where a 'no tone mapping' approach is currently the norm. We're looking forward to more industry feedback on this initial release and hope to see further work in this area going forward. Through OpenColorIO, the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper can already be used in several Autodesk products, including 3ds Max and Maya." Henrik Edstrom, distinguished software architect, Autodesk

“It was great working with Khronos on getting the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper production ready, and to make it available via OpenColorIO for everyone." Ton Roosendaal, chairman, Blender Foundation

"For Dassault Systèmes, virtual twins are the cornerstone of sustainable business innovations across the entire product lifecycle. Visualization in product engineering and commercialization transcends the mere creation of visually appealing content; it's about ensuring authenticity, accuracy and trustworthiness. Tone mapping plays an essential role in bridging the virtual world with our real-world output devices. The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper represents a significant stride towards achieving authentic and reliable product visualization." Bastian Sdorra, rendering R&D engineer, Dassault Systèmes

“Achieving color, tone and visual accuracy to visualize physical products is one of the toughest 3D challenges in e-commerce today. This became a key focus for the Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group, and we are very excited to launch the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper to help solve this long standing issue. The results have also been very beneficial for us at London Dynamics, enabling our customers to see their products much more accurately than before without the need for our 3D Artists modifying shaders or lighting artificially to achieve the same results.” Daniel Frith, Chair of The Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group, Vice-Chair of The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group & Chief Creative Office at London Dynamics.

"The Khronos innovative tone mapping solution sets a new standard in digital representation for eCommerce, ensuring that users enjoy vivid, real-life visuals. Phasmatic immediately adopted this technology to enhance its ability to deliver authentic online product experiences." Andreas Vasilakis, CEO and cofounder, Phasmatic

“Threekit is impressed with the quality of the results produced by the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper. For ecommerce applications, presenting true-to-life colors to users on the computer screen is incredibly important, and the new tone mapper from Khronos makes this easier to do." Ben Houston, CTO and founder, Threekit

Getting Involved

The development and rapid uptake of the Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper was made possible by the cross-industry collaboration that takes place within the Khronos 3D Formats and 3D Commerce Working Groups. Content creators, artists, implementers, and engine developers are encouraged to share their feedback, questions, and suggestions for future improvement by engaging with the Working Group on GitHub, Discord, Khronos Discussion Forum, Stack Overflow or X.

Any company can get directly involved in the development of glTF and other Khronos standards by becoming members. Learn more at khronos.org/members. 

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 180 industry-leading companies creating royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel computation, vision processing and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

OpenXR 1.1 consolidates multiple extensions into the core OpenXR specification to reduce fragmentation and simplify development of advanced XR applications.

Beaverton, OR – April 15, 2024 – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the immediate availability of the OpenXR™ 1.1 specification. This release evolves the widely adopted OpenXR open API standard for high-performance, cross-platform access to VR, AR, and mixed reality (MR) — collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. OpenXR 1.1 consolidates widely used API extensions into the core specification to reduce fragmentation and adds new functionality to streamline the development of more powerful and efficient XR applications.

In particular, OpenXR 1.1 consolidates multiple vendor extensions for key functionality to reduce differences in application code across multiple platforms, while still remaining flexible and extensible to foster innovation in a rapidly growing and evolving market. The OpenXR Working Group will focus on managing a pipeline of extensions to develop and seek feedback on new functionality, while proactively integrating proven technology into the core specification to provide developers with robust cross-platform XR capabilities.

Today, most major XR platforms have transitioned to using OpenXR to expose current and future device capabilities. Vendors with conformant OpenXR implementations include Acer, ByteDance, Canon, HTC, Magic Leap, Meta, Microsoft, Sony, XREAL, Qualcomm, Valve, Varjo, and Collabora’s Monado open source runtime. OpenXR is also supported by all the major game and rendering engines, including Autodesk VRED, Blender, Godot, NVIDIA’s Omniverse, StereoKit, Unreal Engine, and Unity.

The OpenXR 1.1 specification can be found on the Khronos website and on GitHub OpenXR Registry.

Extensions Promoted to the OpenXR 1.1 Core Specification

OpenXR integrates the following functionality, previously available through extensions, into the core specification.

Local Floor (promoted from XR_EXT_local_floor) provides a new Reference Space with a gravity-aligned world-locked origin for standing-scale content that can be recentered to the current user position at the press of a button without a calibration procedure. It also has an estimated floor height built-in. More details about Local Floor functionality and its value to developers are available in this blog post. 

Stereo with Foveated Rendering (promoted from XR_VARJO_quad_views) provides a Primary View Configuration to realize eye-tracked foveated rendering or fixed foveated rendering for XR headsets across multiple graphics rendering APIs. Its use is especially beneficial for efficiently rendering high-pixel-count displays, which put a heavy load on the GPU. The original vendor extension has been adopted natively in Unity, Unreal, and recently by NVIDIA Omniverse.

Grip Surface (promoted from XR_EXT_palm_pose) provides a Standard Pose Identifier that reliably anchors visual content relative to the user's physical hand, whether the hand position is tracked directly or inferred from a physical controller’s position and orientation.

XrUuid (promoted from XR_EXT_uuid) provides a Common Data Type to hold a Universally Unique Identifier that follows the IETF RFC 4122.

xrLocateSpaces (and its corresponding extension equivalent XR_KHR_locate_spaces) provides a Locating Spaces function to improve performance and simplify application code by enabling an application to locate an array of spaces in a single function call populating an “array of structures” (AoS), instead of being limited to locating a single space per function call.

Feature Enhancements

In addition to consolidating extensions, OpenXR 1.1 also provides developers with a set of new features and clarifications, including:

Interaction Profile Improvements

Streamline action system programming. Developers can now take advantage of these new standards:

• Interaction Profile Paths: 13 new interaction profiles have been added to the OpenXR 1.1 core specification, most promoted from vendor extensions
• Standard Identifiers: includes thumb_resting_surfaces, stylus, trigger_curl, and trigger_slide
• Standard Component: adds proximity
• Output Paths: haptic_trigger and haptic_thumb

Fundamentals

Improvements  in OpenXR 1.1 provide developers with an extended set of universal tools for building enhanced XR experiences:

• XrDuration: Clarify behavior for a negative duration
• Event Polling: Clarify runtime and application behavior for polling
• Two-Call Idiom: Precise explanation for “buffer size”
• New Structures: Added color without alpha channel (XrColor3f), rectangular prism (XrExtent3Df), oriented sphere (XrSpheref), oriented box (XrBoxf), and frustum (XrFrustum)

New Error Codes

New error code XR_ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_PERMISSIONS and XR_ERROR_DEPENDENCY_NOT_ENABLED help with application debugging (see xr.xml).

Specification Refinement

OpenXR 1.1 provides clearer explanations of specification intent, while removing ambiguity, and strengthening the preciseness of normative language. Affected chapters include:

• Spaces: OpenXR 1.1 adds links to Reference Spaces to easily identify them in the text. It also strengthens normative language for both runtimes and app developers
• Rendering: the XR_COMPOSITION_LAYER_CORRECT_CHROMATIC_ABERRATION_BIT is deprecated since it is not used in any shipping runtimes
• Input: mentions of “Default Bindings” are removed and timing requirements for reading input action state are clarified
• Appendix: Updated list of contributors
• Versions: A new chapter to show promoted extensions between versions

"OpenXR 1.1 marks a significant milestone in the development of this open standard that has become widely adopted throughout the XR industry. OpenXR 1.0 provided baseline capabilities and the foundation for experimentation with new functionality through extensions. Now the Working Group is pivoting to manage regular core specification updates that balance the need for flexibility to ship new functionality with consolidation of proven technology to reduce fragmentation and enable true cross-platform application portability. By simplifying development while fostering innovation, we aim to empower developers to concentrate on creating groundbreaking immersive, cross-platform experiences. OpenXR 1.1 embodies the collective dedication of the Working Group and the extended XR community to refine and advance the OpenXR standard while being responsive to the dynamic requirements of a rapidly evolving ecosystem," said Alfredo Muniz, Chair of the OpenXR Working Group.

Conformance Test Suite Enhancements

The OpenXR Conformance Test Suite (CTS), freely available on GitHub, includes updates and enhancements for the functionality that has been integrated into the OpenXR 1.1 core specification, enabling consistent implementation across all conformant platforms. A development version is published and an approved release for conformance submissions will be available in Q2.

OpenXR Roadmap and Call for Community Feedback

The OpenXR Working Group welcomes and encourages feedback from the XR developer community on their experience with using OpenXR. Such feedback is essential input to prioritizing future developments on the OpenXR roadmap so that the evolving real-world requirements of developers are met. For example, the Working Group is currently exploring multiple functionality domains such as extending hand tracking to include full body tracking, and enhanced handling of spatial entities to provide standardized methods to interact with the user’s environment in advanced spatial computing applications.

Please provide OpenXR feedback via the OpenXR Discord channel, OpenXR Forums, or the GitHub Issue Tracker. 

Industry Support for OpenXR 1.1

“Collabora is thrilled about the release of OpenXR 1.1, a significant milestone that underscores the importance of free standards in the XR industry. As pioneers in the free and open source XR ecosystem, Collabora has made substantial investments in Monado, the leading open source OpenXR runtime, to ensure seamless compatibility and performance across a wide range of devices. We would like to take this opportunity to deeply appreciate the dedicated efforts of the OpenXR Working Group members who generously contributed their time, expertise, and insights to bring this release to reality. We eagerly anticipate the broader OpenXR adoption that will result from this release,” said Frederic Plourde, XR lead of Collabora.

“This marks a significant milestone for OpenXR—an impressive achievement in advancing an open ecosystem. At HTC, we remain committed to open standards, streamlining the creation of XR experiences. We will continue to support OpenXR 1.1 for both PC and AIO, are excited about the new release and look forward to the thriving growth of the OpenXR community,” said Asii Wu, vice president of HTC.

“We are delighted to know about the OpenXR 1.1 version release. Kivisense has been intensively exploring the frontier innovation in the AR world with our AR engine service. As a long time supporter of OpenXR and an ecosystem partner, we appreciated huge efforts by members in the working group who contributed their time and wisdom in it and completed it. We will keep our AR engine service as part of the OpenXR ecosystem, and help to make it more prosperous,” said Steven Zhang, founder and CEO of Kivisense.

“Meta has been committed to building an open, cross-platform standard for the XR industry since the inception of the OpenXR standard in 2016”, says Jonathan Wright, senior staff engineer at Meta. “The OpenXR 1.1 release is one more step towards making it easier for developers to build XR applications. We continue to support the evolution of the OpenXR standard as we work to build an open and interoperable XR ecosystem.”

“NVIDIA regards OpenXR as a key open standard as it enables portable access to diverse XR devices. OpenXR 1.1 is an important step in consolidating important functionality while reducing fragmentation for developers. NVIDIA is working to leverage OpenXR in its CloudXR Suite that enables flexible delivery of sophisticated immersive experiences to a broad range of devices,” said David Chu, vice president of Spatial Computing and XR, NVIDIA.

“OPPO is excited about the OpenXR 1.1 global release. It's a critical achievement for the XR industry to build a prosperous XR ecosystem. As a long-time supporter of OpenXR, we are applying OpenXR specification on OPPO's XR products. OPPO is an innovative company in exploring technologies, products, content, and services for XR. Equipped with the advanced capabilities of OpenXR to empower developers, our latest OPPO MR Glass Developer Edition represents our continuous exploration in this direction," said Yi Xu, director of XR Technology at OPPO.

"PICO is excited about the OpenXR 1.1 release, which marks another important step towards improving industry standardization for cross-platform XR applications development. PICO has been an adopter of OpenXR 1.0, providing a conformant runtime on PICO Neo3 and PICO 4 devices since 2022. PICO actively contributed to the discussions on the OpenXR 1.1 specification, and our runtime implementation will soon be updated to support OpenXR 1.1 fully. We look forward to continuing to advance cross-platform XR development together with the Working Group and the community," said Jian Zhang, head of XR Foundation engineering, PICO

“Our company is committed to building an open and inclusive XR content ecosystem to promote XR content prosperity, which is in line with the original intention of the OpenXR standard. Today, the OpenXR 1.1 version has been released, and we are honored to continue embracing this standard, providing developers with a more compatible and efficient development experience, allowing them to focus more on creative work and further enrich the XR application ecosystem and scenarios. We believe this will also bring great value to our upcoming next-generation spatial computing devices,” said Zhang Song, head of Software Technology department of Play For Dream Technologies.

"Rokid congratulates OpenXR 1.1 release and its new achievement, and we are very supportive of industry’s effort on OpenXR, and appreciate its positive contribution over a long period of time," said Zhemin Li, head of Rokid's International Business Group. "Rokid is a company focusing on human-computer interaction, hoping to make human life better through advanced technologies, and also hopes to make XR more affordable through our efforts. Rokid currently has many AR products in the market and will release a new generation of personal spatial computing suite in the near future, which will further narrow the distance between the technology and ordinary people.”

"Snapdragon Spaces is the platform of choice for many Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality OpenXR conformant products today. We are thrilled with the release of the OpenXR 1.1 specification and the promotion of new extensions that accelerate the pace of innovation in XR and foster an open ecosystem and community. This is an important milestone for the XR industry, reducing fragmentation and adding new features that simplify the creation of immersive applications for developers,” said Brian Vogelsang, senior director, product management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

"Unity is excited for the release of OpenXR 1.1, a step forward for standardization in the XR industry. As advocates for open ecosystems and interoperability, we recognize the importance of OpenXR in simplifying development workflows and empowering creators to build immersive experiences that can seamlessly run across a variety of hardware platforms. With OpenXR 1.1, developers using Unity can expect enhanced compatibility which will ultimately accelerate the growth of the XR community and unlock new possibilities for immersive storytelling," said Peter Kuhn, principal software engineer, Unity. 

“OpenXR 1.1 brings clarity and ease of use to the widespread OpenXR standard. With the most commonly used extensions now included in the core, it will be easier for developers to have confidence in relying on the features they need. These updates also promote simplicity and uniformity as new features are added down the line; something we’re super into given our goal of an ecosystem that can apply a developer’s work across hardware and runtimes,” Nathan Nuber, programmer, Valve.

“Varjo has been a contributor and adopter of OpenXR since 2019, and we are excited to be able to equip our enterprise customers with the cutting-edge capabilities of OpenXR 1.1. Among other important updates, the quad view configuration is a core part of this release, lowering the threshold for developers to render in human-eye resolution with Varjo's mixed reality headsets. We look forward to the transformative impact OpenXR 1.1 will have on the XR industry at large,” said Denny Rönngren, OpenXR system architect at Varjo.

"XREAL enthusiastically welcomes the OpenXR 1.1 release, a key milestone in fostering unified development for immersive experiences. We are gearing up for the launch of our new product lineup in 2024, which includes an innovative computing device, a continuously updated SDK package, and the XREAL Nebula OS. Committed to integrating OpenXR 1.1 specifications across our entire product line, we aim to provide developers with the essential tools for crafting innovative AR and VR experiences across platforms. We're excited to contribute to this global endeavor, advancing the potential of virtual and augmented reality," said Yu Zhang, vice president of software development, XREAL.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 180 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, metaverse, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, Kamaros™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

Beaverton, OR – January 25, 2024 – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest roadmap milestone for Vulkan®, the cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. The Vulkan roadmap targets the “immersive graphics” market, made up of mid- to high-end smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and desktop devices. The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone captures a set of capabilities that are expected to be supported in new products for that market, beginning in 2024. The roadmap specification provides a significant increase in functionality for the targeted devices and sets the evolutionary direction of the API, including both new hardware capabilities and improvements to the programming model for Vulkan developers.

Vulkan Roadmap 2024 is the second milestone release on the Vulkan Roadmap. Products that support it must be Vulkan 1.3 conformant and support the extensions and capabilities defined in both the 2022 and 2024 Roadmap specifications. Vulkan roadmap specifications use the Vulkan Profile mechanism to help developers build portable Vulkan applications; roadmap requirements are expressed in machine-readable JSON files, and tooling in the Vulkan SDK auto-generates code that makes it easy for developers to query for and enable profile support in their applications. 

The extensions and features required by Vulkan Roadmap 2024 include several newly released extensions, plus mandatory support for a number of previously optional features and increases in minimum hardware capabilities:

• Dynamic Rendering Local Read: The VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read extension adds support for framebuffer-local dependencies to dynamic rendering, allowing developers to fully move over to dynamic rendering on all GPUs. View Blog Post for details.
• Shader Maximal Reconvergence: The VK_KHR_shader_maximal_reconvergence extension defines intuitive behavior of thread divergence in shaders, enabling advanced parallel algorithms to be developed. 
• Shader Quad Control: The VK_KHR_shader_quad_control extension defines enhanced texturing operations in control flow, enabling performance and quality improvements. View the Maximal Reconvergence and Shader Quad Control blog for more details. 
• Additional Features: The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone also requires support for shader half-float and 8/16-bit integer types, multi-draw indirect, shader draw parameters, push descriptors, and an increase to 7 Descriptor Sets and 8 Color Attachments (each up from 4).

Support for these new extensions will be included in the next Vulkan SDK release. Most Vulkan Adopters that support the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone are expected to offer conformant products starting in 2024.

“The release of the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone marks our second step along the path that we outlined with the release of Vulkan 1.3 and Vulkan Roadmap 2022. As we extend the Vulkan Roadmap further into the future, we are building momentum toward greater standardization and efficiency for the Vulkan ecosystem. The key features of the Roadmap 2024 specification include both widely requested quality-of-life improvements and some important novel features, and their presence in the Roadmap ensures that they will become standard across a wide range of hardware. That will make it easier to develop portable applications and allow developers to work more efficiently. We are not just building a graphics API here; we are laying a foundation for the future of immersive graphics, demonstrating the value of collaborative development and shared vision in the Vulkan community,” said Tom Olson, Vulkan Working Group Chair.

Developers are invited to attend Vulkanised 2024 (Sunnyvale, CA | Feb 7-9) for a chance to learn more about the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 and the Profiles Toolset, and to connect with peers and industry experts to explore the very latest Vulkan developments.

Vulkan’s Evolution

Vulkan Roadmap specifications expose advanced features initially found in higher-end GPUs, but will become widely available in mid-to-high-end GPUs during the lifetime of that specification. As these features also become common across mainstream GPUs, they become candidates for incorporation into future Vulkan core specifications.

Vulkan Roadmap specifications complement Vulkan core specifications by identifying functionality that is becoming widely supported in a specific market segment, and defining additional minimum limits for implementations to reduce fragmentation.

Call for Feedback

The Vulkan Working Group welcomes and encourages feedback on the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone to help define the next steps for Vulkan on GitHub Vulkan-Docs. Developers are also invited to join the Vulkan Discord channel, or any of the support forums available at vulkan.org

Industry Support

“The Vulkan 2024 milestone is an important step towards improving industry standardization, ensuring wider support for several features that developers want to be able to rely on. AMD’s Vulkan implementation already supports many of these features, and our AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition™ driver will soon be updated to include full support for this milestone on supporting hardware,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, senior vice president and chief software officer, AMD.

“The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 Milestone gives developers a solid foundation to build portable next-generation graphics and compute applications, and assurance that its features will become ubiquitous in new mid through to flagship mobile devices,” said Geraint North, vice president ecosystems and engineering, client line of business, Arm. “Features like the local read extension let developers access the bandwidth-saving potential of Arm GPUs, without sacrificing portability or the simplicity of dynamic rendering. We look forward to supporting Vulkan Roadmap 2024 in new Arm Immortalis and Arm Mali drivers for capable devices starting later this year.”

"Imagination is excited about the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone. It is an important achievement in Khronos's effort to ensure standardization of a rich Vulkan feature set with a wide availability of supported devices. The roadmap will continue improving the experience for software developers and accelerate the pace of graphics innovation. Imagination is happy to contribute to the ecosystem by providing support for the 2024 Vulkan roadmap profile in our PowerVR™ drivers," said Tim Mamtora, chief of innovation and engineering, Imagination Technologies.

“NVIDIA is at the forefront of creating innovative graphics technologies and their delivery to end-users. As a long-time supporter of Vulkan, NVIDIA is providing immediate support for the Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone on our newest GPUs with support going back through the Volta architecture on Windows and Linux,” said Dwight Diercks, senior vice president of software engineering, NVIDIA.

About Vulkan

Vulkan is an open, royalty-free API for high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs, with widespread adoption in leading engines, cutting-edge games, and demanding applications. Vulkan is supported in a diverse range of devices from Windows and Linux PCs, consoles, and the cloud, to mobile phones and embedded platforms.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 200 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, metaverse, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, Kamaros™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

Beaverton, OR – January 18, 2024 –The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards for 3D graphics, XR, parallel programming, vision acceleration, and machine learning, has announced the agenda for Vulkanised 2024, taking place in Mountain View, CA, USA on February 5-7, 2024.

Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan® API, an open, royalty-free API for high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs. Vulkanised is a unique technical event that brings the Vulkan community together to exchange ideas, solve problems, and help steer the future development of the Vulkan API and ecosystem.

Vulkanised 2024 will feature talks from Vulkan implementers, engine and framework builders, thought leaders, researchers, educators, and open-source tool providers from around the world. Speakers represent diverse organizations ranging from ARM, Autodesk, Meta, and NVIDIA, to UC Santa Cruz and the University of Vienna.

The three-day program will include:

• Technical sessions covering Vulkan validation, SDK installation, Vulkan development for Apple desktops and devices, and the new Vulkan Video Encode API.
• Case study and best practice presentations drawn from real-world implementations.
• Updates on the Vulkan SDK and development roadmap.
• Drinks reception, conference dinner, and daily networking lunches.

Registration is open now, and Early Bird Pricing is available through January 21, 2024. The Early Bird Price for a three-day, all-access pass is $475; the standard price is $595. View the full agenda and register to attend at vulkan.org/events/vulkanised-2024.

Vulkanised is organized by the The Khronos Group, the open, non-profit, member-driven consortium creating a wide range of advanced royalty-free standards, including Vulkan. This event is made possible by the support of Platinum sponsors ARM, Google, LunarG and NVIDIA.

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 150 industry-leading companies creating royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel computation, vision processing and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.