Developers building safety-critical applications can now get started with Vulkan® SC faster than ever. The new Vulkan SC SDK is a simpler way to install and use a comprehensive set of tools and utilities to leverage the Vulkan SC ecosystem. With installers for Linux and Windows, the SDK makes it easy for developers to get up and running quickly, whether they are just getting started with Vulkan SC or building on existing deployments.

On the eve of IWOCL 2026, the Khronos® OpenCL Working Group has released OpenCL™  3.1, bringing widely deployed, field-proven capabilities into the core specification to expand functionality, including SPIR-V ingestion, that developers will be able to rely on across conformant implementations. The new specification arrives into a growing OpenCL ecosystem, with implementations from multiple silicon vendors, particularly in mobile and embedded markets, and higher-level frameworks including SYCL™  and chipStar increasingly targeting OpenCL as an acceleration backend. The open-source compiler and runtime ecosystem around OpenCL also continues to mature with layered implementations of OpenCL over Vulkan and DirectX 12 — widening OpenCL’s cross-platform availability, including on platforms without native drivers.

The OpenCL Working Group has published a draft extension (cl_khr_cooperative_matrix) that brings cooperative matrix operations—a key technology for accelerating ML inference—to OpenCL, developed in collaboration with Arm, Intel, and Qualcomm. A companion extension to expose these capabilities directly in the OpenCL C language is also in progress, and the community is invited to review both drafts and provide feedback before they are finalized.

New extensions address long-standing challenges in distributed computing and runtime control, delivering the final core features for OpenVX 2.0.

The Khronos OpenXR working group has expanded its Extension Matrix to include self-reported data from middleware providers. Developers now have a clearer view of what's available across the broader XR stack.

The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group, which manages both the glTF and KTX standards, has launched an Education, Insights, and Outreach (EIO) Subgroup dedicated to equipping creators and developers with the guidance, resources, and real-world information they need to unlock glTF's full potential.

In this blog we explore how FFmpeg uses Vulkan Compute to seamlessly accelerate encoding and decoding of even professional-grade video on consumer GPUs — unlocking GPU compute parallelism at scale, without specialized hardware. This approach complements Vulkan Video's fixed-function codec support, extending acceleration to formats and workflows it doesn't cover.

If you've been working with 3D on the web for any length of time, glTF™ needs no introduction. The ecosystem of glTF tools has grown into a rich, mature landscape—from exporters and converters to validators, engines, and authoring tools. Developers and artists rely on glTF tooling daily, and the format has become the pervasive industry standard for real-time 3D assets. The glTF Working Group at Khronos® is excited to announce two

The Vulkan Working Group at Khronos has published Building a Simple Game Engine, a new in-depth tutorial for developers ready to move beyond the basics and into professional-grade engine development. The series builds on the Core Vulkan Tutorial, guiding you through architectural principles and design patterns purpose-built for Vulkan-based rendering engines — helping you design clean, modular systems that scale with your project.

In 2025, Khronos reached an impressive milestone: 25 years of member-driven open standards development. The graphics, compute, and media landscape looked wildly different in 2000, when Khronos was formed, than it does today. Era-defining technologies such as smartphones, cloud computing, and the metaverse hadn’t yet emerged into the marketplace. The founders of Khronos were on the forefront of these emerging technologies. They knew that without flexible, consensus-driven interoperability standards, these nascent technologies would be severely limited by fragmentation and duplication of efforts–and that, conversely, open standards had the potential to foster a marketplace of interoperable technologies that would allow innovation to thrive.

When those of us in the Vulkan® working group want to modify the API—whether it’s a new hardware feature to expose, a new use case we want to address, or even just a gap in the spec we want to address—we have one invaluable tool that we make heavy use of: extensions! Extensions are a wonderful way for us to get improvements to the Vulkan API out to developers without waiting for a new core version. They let vendors expose novel functionality and enable us to gather community feedback on new features before we firm them up into a core specification. Amazing! So we get new functionality out to developers quickly—what’s not to love!? Well…

The Khronos Vulkan API is in continuous development, and today the Vulkan Working Group has released two important updates to the API and ecosystem: an entirely new Descriptor system and the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone. These new features and more will be discussed at the forthcoming Vulkanised 2026 conference, taking place in San Diego on February 9-11.

SIGGRAPH ASIA is a pivotal gathering place for the global graphics community. This is where the industry pushes the boundaries of the state of the art and sets the direction for collaborative efforts. The Khronos® Group is presenting a future-focused slate of BOF presentations and activities at SIGGRAPH Asia 2025, taking place in Hong Kong, December 15 -18.

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.