RedGamingTech's Paul Eccleston sits down for this interview with Khronos Group President, Neil Trevett. They discuss a range of topics including Vulkan and the addition of Descriptor Heaps (which will be the new standard rather than the binding model), what the industry have decided around Work Graphs and work lists (especially because DX12 is pushing away from Work Graphs), Neural Rendering.

Neural texture compression, RTX Mega Geometry, neural materials and how the rendering pipeline may change in the long term, including how APIs will evolve for both graphics and other technologies as hardware becomes more powerful and AI models handle more of the workloads in games.

Other subjects include SLANG, Neural rendering and AI, glTF and OpenXR. While Virtual Reality hasn't been embraced so quickly by gamers, VR and Augmented Reality has its place in many other fields, and so technology such as OpenXR is going to be increasingly important.

SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles delivered a clear snapshot of the future of graphics and spatial computing—and Khronos was at the center of it. The organization presented more than 20 sessions spanning hands-on courses and in-depth Birds of a Feather (BOF) discussions on neural graphics, XR, 3D assets, rendering, and real-time shading. Wednesday, July 22 served as the dedicated Khronos Developer Day, with status updates from the Vulkan, glTF, WebGL/WebGPU, OpenXR, ANARI, and Slang Working Groups, plus the Machine Learning Council, followed by a networking reception for members and guests. Click through for a full recap of activities. 

The Khronos Group today announced dates and venue for two co-located events in Kortrijk, Belgium: Vulkanised 2027 (February 8–10) and the Real-Time Shading Symposium 2027 (February 11–12). Both events will be hosted at Howest University of Applied Sciences' The Penta facility, with Howest serving as venue sponsor.

The Slang team at The Khronos Group is excited to announce a collaborative milestone: the MaterialX project now includes a dedicated Slang shader generator. MaterialX, an Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) project, describes complex, hardware-agnostic look-development data. This integration positions Slang as a critical bridge for open-standard material interoperability—and adoption by a major industry standard like MaterialX powerfully validates our "write once, run anywhere" philosophy.

One key benefit of introducing Slang in MaterialX is that it enables the integration of machine learning and inverse rendering workflows into the MaterialX and OpenUSD ecosystem, leveraging Slang's differentiable rendering capabilities. In the future, MaterialX could offload the complexity of generating shading code in GLSL, HLSL, MSL, and WGSL to the Slang compiler itself, leveraging its capabilities as a unified infrastructure layer for modern graphics pipelines.
The integration also brings MaterialX's rich, standardized library of nodes and definitions into the Slang world. We can't wait to see how developers leverage this capability to build more robust, cross-platform rendering engines.

The 2026 program includes invited talks, and technical presentations spanning a wide range of topics that matter to programmers. If you work with Shading Languages then this event will provide a unique opportunity to connect with your peers, learn from leaders in their fields, and advance your expertise.

Explore the program and register today!

The Khronos Group Birds of a Feather Sessions yesterday at the Fairmont was superb! It was great to see everyone again and to hear updates from WebGL, glTF, 3D Commerce, ANARI, OpenXR, Slang, ML Council and Vulkan. Afterward, the networking reception was packed and festive! 

Thank you to our Networking Reception sponsors: Cesium, LunarG, and NVIDIA!

We are excited for next week's SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, Canada! The Khronos Group has a huge agenda featuring Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, panels, and presentations.  Whether you're into graphics, compute, XR, or the future of open standards, there’s something for everyone in the Khronos lineup. Don’t miss your chance to connect with us and the wider developer community.

Click through to see the full agenda and the networking reception sponsored by LunarG, Cesium, and NVIDIA. See you in Vancouver!

This blog builds upon the previous blog post, Neural Graphics: First Principles to Performance, and explores advanced performance optimizations using Slang's familiar 2D differentiable Gaussian splatting example as a testbed. After recapping the 3D differentiable Gaussian splatting example and recapping the diff-splatting approach to a staged pipeline, the blog introduces wave intrinsics and the subsequent performance payoff. 

Sascha Willems has added Slang shaders to almost all of his Vulkan API open source samples. In this blog, he gives his impressions.

Join us on May 20th for an engaging hands-on Slang virtual meetup where we’ll walk through creating your first Gaussian splat using Slang. Perfect for graphics programmers interested in getting started with neural techniques, this hands-on introduction will take you from installation through basic shader compilation to rendering your first splat.

In the last blog, Slang Working Group Chair Shannon Woods, explained how gradient descent is used to drive Gaussian splatting representations– essentially, going through a list of blobs in 2D space, calculating their color values at a specific texture coordinate, and blending them together, and iteratively adjusting them to be as close as possible to an ideal target image. Notably, this simplified version had significant performance and quality limitations. In this post, Shannon demonstrates the changes needed to go from that simple pedagogical example to an implementation that achieves real-time performance.

The intersection of computer graphics and machine learning is creating exciting new possibilities, from scene reconstruction with NeRFs and Gaussian splats to learning complex material properties, but getting started with neural graphics can seem daunting. Between understanding graphics APIs, shader programming, and automatic differentiation, there’s a lot to learn. That’s why the Slang team is introducing SlangPy, a new Python package that makes it dramatically easier to build neural graphics applications with Slang.

Today, LunarG released a new Vulkan SDK for Windows, Linux, and macOS that fully supports Vulkan API revision 1.4.

New features in SDK 1.4.304.0

Highlights of the Vulkan SDK 1.4.304.0 release across all operating environments include:

• Full support for the Vulkan 1.4 API specification
• Inclusion of the release version of the Slang shader language and compiler (previous SDK releases contained the beta version of slang)
• Inclusion of a shared library for glslang
• 20+ Vulkan extensions added or promoted to core
• Updates to the Vulkan Configurator (vkconfig) to improve quality and stability
• Improved validation coverage
• plus more...
  

Khronos just returned from a dynamic and productive week at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, which took place from December 3–6 in the bustling city of Tokyo, Japan. With key announcements, a series of well-attended Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions, and a vibrant networking event, Khronos reaffirmed its position at the forefront of standardization for the 3D industry.

Here are some highlights of Khronos’s activities at SIGGRAPH Asia 2024, from unveiling new initiatives to fostering collaboration across the graphics, web, and XR ecosystems.

The Khronos Group has announced the launch of the new Slang™ Initiative. This initiative will oversee and advance the open-source Slang shading language and compiler, building on 15 years of research, development, and deployment experience. Supported by NVIDIA since 2017, Slang has been widely adopted in production projects across the industry.

Slang empowers real-time graphics developers with innovative features that complement existing shading languages, including modular code development, portable deployment to multiple target APIs, and neural computation in graphics shaders. Hosting under multi-company governance at Khronos will enable and foster industry-wide collaboration to drive Slang’s continued evolution.