Real-time graphics evolved quickly through the 1990s and 2000s, but developers struggled with one persistent bottleneck: precise control over when frames appeared on screen. Early APIs like OpenGL relied on opaque buffer-swapping behavior that made smooth frame pacing difficult, often causing choppy motion even at high frame rates. Modern APIs introduced swapchains to improve throughput, yet still prioritized raw FPS over accurate presentation timing. Vulkan followed this pattern, offering strong pipelining but little insight into when queued frames would actually be shown. Early extensions such as VK_GOOGLE_display_timing and VK_KHR_present_wait moved the needle but lacked the precision developers needed. After years of iteration, the new VK_EXT_present_timing extension finally brings explicit, time-based presentation control to Vulkan, marking a significant step toward consistently smooth frame pacing in interactive applications.

Today, we’re excited to share that Shader Execution Reordering in Vulkan has advanced from a vendor-specific extension, VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder, to a multi-vendor Vulkan extension, VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder. Now, this powerful optimization technique can be used across vendors and APIs with similar SER support in Microsoft’s Shader Model 6.9.

The SYCL Working Group at Khronos has been hard at work advancing the ecosystem for this open, royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer, which enables code for heterogeneous and offload processors to be written using modern ISO C++. Through active public development, SYCL continues to grow as developers contribute and provide feedback, shaping the future of this portable programming model. Recently, the SYCL Working Group announced the release of Revision 11 of the SYCL 2020 Specification, introducing eight powerful new extensions alongside numerous specification clarifications that demonstrate the Working Group's continued commitment to advancing the specification for the benefit of both developers and implementers. In this blog, we'll share what's new in the latest revision, as well as where to learn more about SYCL at Supercomputing and how to get involved with the community.

The Khronos® OpenXR™ working group is pleased to announce the release of the Best Practices Validation Layer, now available in the OpenXR-SDK-Source repository. This new tool addresses a critical need in XR development: catching suboptimal API usage patterns that can lead to inconsistent behavior across different OpenXR runtimes.

The Khronos® ANARI™ Working Group recently wrapped up the ANARI Virtual Hackathon 2025, where developers, researchers, and visualization experts from around the world came together to explore what’s next for 3D rendering using the ANARI API. This year’s hackathon arrived at a pivotal time: the ANARI 1.1 specification has officially been ratified by the Khronos Board of Directors, marking a major milestone in the evolution of the industry’s first cross-platform 3D rendering engine API. ANARI 1.1 expands capabilities across geometry, spatial fields, and performance enhancements, and advances how developers and domain experts can leverage high-performance, vendor-neutral rendering.

Earlier this year, we shared how the Godot OpenXR Integration Project, developed in close collaboration with The Khronos® Group, was advancing OpenXR™ development through real-world testing and implementation. Today, I'm excited to provide an update on the significant progress we've made, with several major OpenXR features now production-ready and available to developers worldwide.

At Google Chrome, we're dedicated to advancing an open, capable, and instant web for everyone. This vision recently came to life through our partnership with Crayola and Red Games Co., bringing Crayola's beloved mobile app, Create and Play, to the web. Crayola's Create and Play, developed exclusively by Red Games Co., is the #1 iPad creativity app for kids on the Apple App Store and is praised for its blend of educational and artistic experiences

At Blender Studio, our projects are designed to do more than tell stories or create visuals—they function as production-driven R&D. Each film, asset, or tool is a proving ground that surfaces bugs, inspires new features, and tests Blender in real-world conditions. With Project Dogwalk, we expanded this model into game development. Our goal was to build a small, polished game in just four months using an open source pipeline, with Blender as the Digital Content Creation (DCC) hub, Godot as the game engine, and glTF™ as the exchange format at the center. glTF is the widely adopted 3D asset format from the Khronos® Group.

Overview For over two decades, Autodesk VRED has been the cornerstone of automotive visualization, enabling designers and engineers to transform complex CAD data into photorealistic imagery and immersive experiences. Vulkan® is a new-generation, open, royalty-free graphics and compute API from the Khronos® Group designed for high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs that is increasingly replacing the previous OpenGL® 3D AP

Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of building a new set of glTF showcase assets for the Khronos Group. These models were designed not just to look great in the updated glTF Sample Viewer, but to demonstrate what’s possible with glTF today—and to share the workflows behind them so artists can apply these techniques in their own projects. Each asset comes with a step-by-step creation guide on GitHub, detailing the modeling, materials, and export process, including how to make the most of glTF’s growing set of extensions. The goal is to give artists clear, reproducible examples of how to achieve realistic results in compact, efficient 3D models. In this post, I’ll introduce the four newest showcase assets and talk about the unique challenges they present. You can explore the models directly in the Sample Viewer, dig into their source files on GitHub, and follow detailed creation notes for each one.

Recognizing the transformative potential of 3D Gaussian Splats, leading organizations across the geospatial, graphics, and standards domains — including Khronos Group®, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Niantic Spatial, Cesium(Bentley), and Esri— have come together to integrate 3D Geospatial Gaussian Splats into Khronos’ widely adopted glTF™ 3D asset format standard. This collaborative initiative aims to create a standardized, interoperable framework for encoding and sharing 3D Gaussian Splats, ensuring broad interoperability and easy implementation across platforms and applications.

As the 3D commerce industry evolves, artists and brands alike need clear, up-to-date guidance to efficiently produce optimized assets. Today, we're excited to announce the launch of version 2.0 of the Asset Creation Guidelines—a comprehensive and continuously updated resource designed to help 3D artists create photorealistic, commerce-ready assets for web, XR, games, and other real-time 3D applications. Like the original Real-Time Asset Creation Guidelines, these best practices use glTF as a de facto target format, and can be applied to any 3D content creation workflow. The new Asset Creation Guidelines are designed to help artists ranging from beginners to experts develop 3D cross-platform content for real-time rendering. If you’ve ever wondered how to create a photorealistic 3D model, how to animate a model to show how it works in addition to how it looks, or how to compress a 3D model for faster download, this resource is for you.

The Khronos ANARI (Analytic Rendering Interface) Working Group is excited to share developments as we approach SIGGRAPH 2025, including a first look at ANARI 1.1 updates. With ANARI 1.1 features planned and a growing ecosystem of tools and implementations, the industry's first cross-platform 3D rendering engine API continues to evolve to meet the demands of modern scientific visualization and rendering applications.

As excitement builds for SIGGRAPH 2025, the Khronos Group is preparing to host its annual Vulkan Birds of a Feather session at SIGGRAPH 2025 on Wednesday, August 13, from 4:30 to 6:00 pm. The BOF is an essential gathering for graphics developers, GPU vendors, and graphics enthusiasts eager to stay on the cutting edge of the industry’s leading cross-platform graphics and compute API. This year’s Vulkan BOF will be packed with meaningful updates and will provide a great opportunity for community engagement. In this blog post, we preview the key Vulkan developments, initiatives, and events that will take center stage at the BOF, including: an update on Vulkan 1.4 adoption, recent extensions, a proposed new deprecation mechanism, enhancements to our samples and documentation, plus updates on the Vulkanised 2026 conference, and much more.

The set of extensions known as Vulkan Video, developed by the Vulkan® Working Group at The Khronos® Group, provides developers with vendor-independent access to video decoding and encoding functionality in modern GPU hardware. Today, with the release of version 1.4.321 of the Vulkan specification, Vulkan Video is once again being expanded for encoding operations with the introduction of the Encode Intra-refresh extension—the second