Press Releases

Today 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.

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.

The Khronos Group 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.

The Khronos Group announces OpenXR Live to be held in Seattle, Washington on September 12, 2024. A call for submissions has been issued with a due date of July 31, 2024.

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 , Autodesk, Babylon.js, Blender, Dassault, Filament, London Dynamics, Phasmatic, Three.js, and Threekit.

The Khronos Group 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 Khronos Group 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.

The Khronos Group will bring the beloved Vulkanised developer conference to Mountain View, CA, USA on February 5-7, 2024. Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan® API and 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.

The Khronos® Group, announces the launch of the SYCL™ 2020 Adopters Program to enable implementations to become officially conformant to the latest-generation SYCL specification—and to ensure that SYCL is consistently implemented by multiple vendors to create a reliable platform for developers. SYCL 2020 is the open industry standard for single source C++-based heterogeneous parallel programming. The SYCL Working Group has released an updated Conformance Test Suite (CTS) as part of the SYCL 2020 Adopters Program, making it available as an open source GitHub project to enable broad industry participation in implementation testing and ongoing test suite improvements.

The Khronos Group will bring the beloved Vulkanised developer conference to Mountain View, CA, USA on February 5-7, 2024. Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan® API and 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.

The Khronos® Group announces that the ANARI™ 1.0 open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API has been finalized and that multiple implementations are shipping from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, together with an open-source software development kit (SDK) from Khronos. ANARI significantly simplifies the development of applications in domains such as scientific visualization by providing high-level functionality to build an in-memory scene representation to be rendered without the need for low-level graphics code and enabling the use of any 3D rendering engine that supports the ANARI API. The ANARI 1.0 specification has been openly developed and incorporates significant community feedback, including compatibility with glTF™ Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials. ANARI has already been widely integrated into scientific visualization applications and is expected to be used by diverse applications needing portable access to multiple rendering engines delivering sophisticated 3D functionality such as ray tracing and global illumination. Khronos welcomes feedback from the developer community at the ANARI GitHub.

Beaverton, OR – March 15, 2023 – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the creation of the SYCL™ SC Working Group to create a high-level heterogeneous computing framework for streamlining certification of safety-critical systems in automotive, avionics, medical, and industrial markets. SYCL SC will leverage the proven SYCL 2020 standard for parallel programming of diverse computing devices using standard C++17. Over the past year, the safety-critical community has gathered in the Khronos SYCL Safety-Critical Exploratory Forum to build consensus on use cases and industry requirements to catalyze and guide the design of this new open standard. The SYCL SC Working Group is open to any Khronos member, and Khronos membership is open to any company.

The Khronos Group announces that LunarG has released the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.3.239.0 for Windows and Linux with full support for the four Vulkan Video extensions finalized in December 2022, including header upgrades and Validation Layer integration. Together with drivers shipping from multiple GPU vendors, developers are now equipped with the essential tools to use Vulkan Video-accelerated H.264 and H.265 decode in frameworks and applications.

Today the Khronos Group announced that its glTF 2.0 specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D models has been released as the ISO/IEC 12113:2022 International Standard. Khronos has successfully completed the transposition of glTF 2.0 through the ISO/IEC JTC 1 PAS (Publicly Available Specification) Submission Process to solidify glTF’s global recognition and accelerate its adoption by industry and other standards. Khronos will continue to evolve glTF as a Khronos specification and regularly update ISO/IEC 12113 with proven, widely available glTF functionality to avoid industry fragmentation.