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

Minecraft: Java Edition is hard at work getting Vibrant Visuals ready. They have been exploring refactoring and looking at ways to modernize their rendering code. Following this work, they are now preparing to make a change to the underlying technology they use to render the game, by switching from OpenGL to Vulkan.

The Mesa 26.0 open-source graphics stack has been released as a major update that introduces new features and improvements across most of the included graphics drivers. Highlights of Mesa 26.0 include KosmicKrisp, a new Vulkan to Metal layered driver for macOS, significant raytracing performance improvements to the RADV Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, and other Vulkan improvements.

In this Bentley blog post, they explain how the new proposed glTF extension turns Gaussian splats into an open standard—creating a path from photorealistic 3D capture to lifelong infrastructure monitoring. The effort is notable for its cross-industry collaboration. Bentley worked not only within Khronos but also with the Open Geospatial Consortium and OpenUSD to ensure the standard would serve industries as diverse as infrastructure engineering and geospatial visualization, e-commerce, gaming, entertainment and others.

Twenty-five years ago, a group of competitors faced a choice that would reshape visual computing. Smartphones, GPU acceleration, and cloud computing hadn't yet emerged, but the founders of Khronos stood at the forefront of nascent technologies poised to transform how billions of people experience the digital world. United by a critical belief—that without consensus-driven interoperability standards, fragmentation and duplicated effort would severely limit these transformative innovations—they chose collaboration over competition, because open standards only work when built by the industry they serve.

In this blog post, XR4Europe talks about the importance of standards for future XR interoperability and focuses on OpenXR, Khronos Group, constraints and project pathways, partnership, IP protection, and meaningful contributions. Horizon Europe Work Programme has put together 5 case studies for practical engagement with OpenXR. 

Khronos is committed to creating global, royalty-free open standards that benefit industry and society. We are actively strengthening our presence in Europe and welcome collaborative discussions and opportunities where it may add value to projects under the Horizon Europe Work Programme.

In this blog, Vulkan Strategy Officer, Tobias Hector, explains the recent release of the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. This extension is the first concrete attempt at totally replacing the existing descriptor set subsystem in Vulkan. While it’s shipping as an EXT for now, it’s on a path to becoming future core functionality.

The Vulkan Working Group attempted to fix the descriptor model with VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer, which developers have had some success with, but we used incremental (if large!) improvements to the existing descriptor set functionality, making it necessary to check for a variety of descriptor set extensions. This incremental approach also didn’t attract wide industry backing, resulting in cross-vendor portability issues. So, we took the lessons learned from VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer, and designed a completely new subsystem.