Khronos Blog Archives

Synchronization in Vulkan® has long been one of its most notorious challenges, something developers haven’t been shy about reminding us. The Khronos® Vulkan Working Group has been steadily working to make Vulkan a joy to use, and simplifying the synchronization model has been high on our priority list. One of the most frequent developer frustrations has been the complexity of managing image layouts, a pain point we’re tackling

The Khronos® OpenXR™ Working Group has released a groundbreaking set of OpenXR extensions that establish the first open standard for spatial computing, enabling consistent cross-platform support for plane and marker detection and tracking, precise spatial anchors, and cross-session persistence. These new Spatial Entities Extensions are now available for public review, and we invite developers to provide feedback to help drive the continued evolution. As the first implementations roll out in 2025, this milestone brings developers powerful new tools for building persistent, interoperable XR spatial experiences across a growing range of devices.

The set of extensions known as "Vulkan Video", developed by the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos®, provides developers with vendor-independent access to video decoding and encoding functionality in modern GPU hardware. Today, with the release of version 1.4.317 of the Vulkan specification, this set of extensions is being expanded once again with the introduction of VP9 decoding. VP9 was among the first royalty-free codecs to gain mass ado

VisIt, the open-source scientific visualization tool developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is entering a new era of advanced rendering. In a collaborative effort between LLNL’s VisIt team and NVIDIA, VisIt has been enhanced with state-of-the-art rendering capabilities by integrating a Khronos Group standard called ANARI™ (Analytic Rendering Interface). This integration, led by Kevin Griffin (a senior developer technology engineer at NVIDIA, ANARI working group member, and former LLNL employee) and in partnership with LLNL developers Kathleen Biagas and Mark Miller, brings physically accurate ray tracing, global illumination, and broader platform support to VisIt’s high-performance visualization workflows.