February 16th 2016 – San Francisco – The Khronos™ Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, announces the immediate availability of the Vulkan™ 1.0 royalty-free, open standard API specification. Vulkan provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to graphics and compute on modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms. This ground-up design, complementing the OpenGL® and OpenGL ES™ 3D APIs, provides applications direct control over GPU acceleration for maximized performance and predictability with minimized CPU overhead and efficient multi-threaded performance. Multiple Vulkan 1.0 hardware drivers and SDKs are available immediately for developers to begin creating Vulkan applications and engines. More information on Vulkan is available at https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/.

Supercomputing 2015– November 16th 2015 – Austin, TX –The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL™ 2.1 and SPIR-V™ 1.0 specifications for heterogeneous parallel computation. Consumption of the new SPIR-V cross-API intermediate language is guaranteed in the core OpenCL 2.1 specification. Khronos has released open source utilities and extensions to enable use of SPIR-V in OpenCL 1.2 and 2.0, as well as the upcoming Vulkan™ graphics API, ensuring widespread availability of its powerful runtime capabilities for developers of parallel computation languages and frameworks. The OpenCL C++ kernel language released in the OpenCL 2.1 provisional specification is being finalized and will be released imminently, also using SPIR-V for run-time execution. The OpenCL 2.1 specification is available for immediate download at www.khronos.org/opencl/ and SPIR-V 1.0 is available at http://www.khronos.org/spir/.

Friedrichsdorf, Germany – November 04, 2015: MAXON, the leading developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation and rendering solutions, is pleased to announce it has joined the Khronos™ Group industry consortium. By joining the Khronos Group, MAXON reasserts its ongoing commitment to support the development of open standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of 3D graphics, games and media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. MAXON will work intensively on the definition and implementation of open exchange and render formats.

The Khronos Group is a non-profit consortium, founded by leading manufacturers in the CG industry and is based in Beaverton, Oregon. The Khronos Group’s goal is the development and deployment of uniform, open formats for the rendering and exchange of graphic and dynamic content, including libraries such as OpenGL, WebGL and the COLLADA format, which have already established themselves as industry standards or are on their way in doing so. Khronos Group members actively support the development of the Khronos API specifications and communicate throughout all phases of development with regard to universal standards that make graphics content cross-platform compatible and accessible on various output devices.

HTML5DevConf– October 19th 2015 – San Francisco, CA –The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, today announced that the glTF™ 1.0 (GL Transmission Format ) royalty-free specification for transmission and loading of 3D content has been finalized for Ratification and is immediately available for use by tools and application vendors. glTF is an efficient, interoperable asset delivery format that compresses the size of 3D scenes and models, and minimizes runtime processing by applications using WebGL™ and other APIs. glTF also defines a common publishing format for 3D content tools and services. More information on glTF specifications and activities is available at: https://www.khronos.org/gltf/.

SIGGRAPH August 10th 2015 – Los Angeles, CA –The Khronos Group, an open consortium of leading hardware and software companies, today announced it is launching a new Safety Critical working group to develop open graphics and compute acceleration standards for markets that require system safety certification. Khronos previously developed the OpenGL® SC 1.0 specification that defined a safety critical subset of OpenGL ES 1.0. The new working group will adapt more recent Khronos standards including OpenGL ES with programmable shaders, and the new generation Vulkan™ API for high-efficiency graphics and compute. Work on detailed proposals is already underway, and companies interested to participate are welcome to join Khronos for a voice and a vote in the development process. More information on Khronos safety critical specifications and activities is available at: https://www.khronos.org/safetycritical.