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

RedGamingTech's Paul Eccleston sits down for this interview with Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett. They discuss a range of topics including Vulkan and the addition of Descriptor Heaps (which will be the new standard rather than the binding model), what the industry have decided around Work Graphs and work lists (especially because DX12 is pushing away from Work Graphs), Neural Rendering.

Neural texture compression, RTX Mega Geometry, neural materials and how the rendering pipeline may change in the long term, including how APIs will evolve for both graphics and other technologies as hardware becomes more powerful and AI models handle more of the workloads in games.

Other subjects include SLANG, Neural rendering and AI, glTF and OpenXR. While Virtual Reality hasn't been embraced so quickly by gamers, VR and Augmented Reality has its place in many other fields, and so technology such as OpenXR is going to be increasingly important.

NVIDIA has added support for VK_NV_low_latency revision 2, to enable out-of-the-box Proton support for NVIDIA Reflex in Vulkan-native games. In addition: 

• Fixed a bug which prevented VK_NV_low_latency2 from reducing latency on swapchains created from VK_KHR_wayland_surface and VK_KHR_display surfaces.
• Fixed multiple startup and alt-tab hangs that occurred with NVIDIA Smooth Motion enabled.
• Fixed a bug that caused a file descriptor leak when the Vulkan loader unloads libGLX_nvidia.so.0 after a call to vkDestroyInstance.
• Added support for the VK_EXT_cluster_acceleration_structure Vulkan extension.

Jagex's RuneScape launched an open beta of its Vulkan renderer on Windows on September 7, replacing OpenGL as the engine transitions for lower CPU overhead, better multi-threading, and improved streaming/loading performance. Android is next, with an eventual Vulkan-to-Metal translation layer for Apple platforms; OpenGL stays as a fallback for incompatible devices.

Help shape the future of safety-critical GPU acceleration! Khronos is collecting requirements for Vulkan SC, SYCL SC & OpenGL SC. This 15-20 min survey is for practitioners in avionics, automotive, industrial & related domains. Survey closes Friday, Oct. 2.

Khronos has released OpenVX 1.3.2, an update to the open, royalty-free standard that uses a high-level graph-based framework to deliver portable, efficient vision processing. This focused update strengthens error handling, improves conformance, and makes OpenVX easier for vendors to implement and for developers to debug — laying the groundwork for the next major release, OpenVX 2.0.

SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles delivered a clear snapshot of the future of graphics and spatial computing—and Khronos was at the center of it. The organization presented more than 20 sessions spanning hands-on courses and in-depth Birds of a Feather (BOF) discussions on neural graphics, XR, 3D assets, rendering, and real-time shading. Wednesday, July 22 served as the dedicated Khronos Developer Day, with status updates from the Vulkan, glTF, WebGL/WebGPU, OpenXR, ANARI, and Slang Working Groups, plus the Machine Learning Council, followed by a networking reception for members and guests. Click through for a full recap of activities.