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

For years, 3D artists and technical directors working in Autodesk 3ds Max have juggled third-party tools and custom scripts to bring glTF assets into their pipelines. Today, that friction disappears.

The Khronos Group® has sponsored the glTF 2.0 Importer/Exporter for Autodesk 3ds Max open-source project under the Apache 2.0 license, and today has released the resulting glTF importer and exporter plugins, built to professional standards in collaboration with the community, and free for all to use.

Bolt Graphics is a semiconductor startup based in Sunnyvale, CA building fast and efficient graphics processors. Bolt is energized by their mission to reduce the barrier of entry for content creation and consumption, with a goal to enable everyone to easily create, simulate and consume immersive experiences as vividly as they can imagine them.

Earlier this year Vulkan Video encode was disabled on newer generations of Intel graphics hardware due to insufficient testing with the Intel ANV open-source driver. That impacted Gen12.5 graphics and newer - basically Alchemist and anything newer. Now at least Gen12.5 graphics with the likes of the Arc A-Series is seeing H.264 and H.265 encoding re-enabled.

Vulkan is deprecating host-side ray tracing acceleration structure build commands in favor of a single, device-address-based path. This aligns Vulkan Ray Tracing with the direction of DirectX Raytracing, modern engine architecture, and hardware trends.

In the six years since Vulkan Ray Tracing launched, the host-side path has seen limited adoption. Developers generally found it more cumbersome than helpful, while implementers had to maintain parallel host/GPU command models that increased complexity and created friction for future ray tracing API evolution.

Firefox is adding hardware-accelerated Vulkan Video decoding, saving Nvidia users on Linux the hassle of manually configuring the nvidia-vaapi-driver package. The change will be included in Firefox 153, out July 21, but it will not be enabled by default – not to start with. Instead, users will be able to flip a pair of preferences in about:config to try it out, with the awareness that there may be hiccups and edge cases (especially on devices with hybrid graphics, mentioned further down).

Adding native Vulkan Video decoding path to its codebase means workarounds will no longer be required.

FFmpeg has introduces Vulkan-accelerated APV encoding to go alongside the earlier development of their Vulkan-accelerated decoding for the APV video format.