There are only a few days left before the start (3D configurators) of the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, while the Khronos released their first session for their Developers Day during the highly anticipated event.
It’s not surprising that the Khronos Group and its members will attract a lot of attention, because Vulkan and Augmented Reality (AR) provide a lot of discussion material and other standards like glTF and WebGL are now very popular in the game development community.
Vulkan will chair many sessions at GDC 2019, which will take place from March 18 to 22 at Moscone Center. There will be a “Vulkan State of the Union” where they will cover many of the extensions introduced last year. We wouldn’t be surprised if they have a Minor/Point version for Vulcano before GDC, but it’s probably rather unrealistic that we’ll see a big Vulcano 1.2-2.0 version. Vulkan 1.1 was introduced during GDC 2018 and since then they have introduced a number of new enhancements ranging from new device memory features to NVIDIA raytracing, an enhancement to transform feedback and much more. There is no sign that a major volcano specification update is in sight, and we can’t think of anything more urgent to justify an upcoming major update to the current point versions.
So Vulkan won’t be presenting any groundbreaking news at GDC 2019 unless some new game studios present innovative content on the new technologies. OpenXR is expected to attract a lot of attention at this year’s Game Developer Conference. OpenXR was announced as the Khronos standard for AR/VR during GDC 2017. The first release of the OpenXR API should be released in calendar year 2019, but that didn’t happen.
The Khronos plan for GDC 2019 shows an OpenXR state of the Union as well as an OpenXR table at VRDC.
Other interesting Khronos sessions will cover NVIDIA, which is about volcano raytracing, AMD speaking GPU performance and many volcanoes about mobile events. More information about Khronos and the GDC 2019 can be found at khronos.org.
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