The OpenGL / Vulkan Slides From Khronos @ SIGGRAPH 2016

Written by Michael Larabel in Standards on 28 July 2016 at 07:40 PM EDT. 9 Comments
STANDARDS
Yesterday were The Khronos Group sessions at SIGGRAPH 2016. I already covered the OpenCL session while now here are my notes from the OpenGL/Vulkan BoF along with the presentation material.

Here are my OpenGL/Vulkan notes from watching the livestream yesterday and going back through the slides today:

- Covering the new ARB_gl_spirv OpenGL Extension that allows OpenGL drivers to accept compiled SPIR-V code. The SPIR-V output from glslang is compatible with this extension.

- The slides incorrectly say Mesa 12.1 was released "yesterday" with OpenGL 4.5. Mesa 12.1 isn't anticipated until September (and may be called Mesa 13.0). Currently only the i965 Intel driver is basically at the GL 4.5 level while RadeonSI/Nouveau are still at OpenGL 4.3, but could reach OpenGL 4.5 by September.

- GLEW 2.0 has been released.

- There's "little demand" for a new OpenGL ES version this year... But there is interest in making OpenGL ES more robust and for delivering fixes/extensions to GLES 3.x.

- Vulkan Next is in development (//www.phoronix.com/news/Khronos-Vulkan-Next), see that article for those post-1.0 details.

- Unreal Engine 4 is making great progress with its Vulkan render architecture.

- Epic Games notes Vulkan driver problems, "Drivers are greatly improved, but you’ll still run into BSODs."

- id Software also ran into Vulkan driver issues. The "small issues" delaying their their Doom Vulkan patch was "driver issues" and the Vulkan swap chain being "surprisingly hard to get right."

- MoltenVK brings a Vulkan-over-Metal implementation to iOS and Mac OS.

- NVIDIA NSIGHT will be brought to Linux in the future along with Android.

For more information see the PDF slides and video.
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