Sascha Willems

I have released update 0.6 for the OpenGL ES CapsViewer.

Changelog :

• Added OpenGL ES 3.2 capabilities (if supported by device)
• Added OpenGL ES 3.1 capabilities (if supported by device)
• Minor bugfixes

The update should be automatically installed, and if you’ve submitted a device where 0.2 reported a wrong OpenGL ES version, please feel free to resubmit it.

I finally found some time to overhaul the OpenGL ES hardware database. I admittedly neglected my OpenGL databases in recent years (mainly due to Vulkan ® and a severe lack of spare time), and especially the OpenGL ES one was in dire need of an overhaul and a cleanup. So I spent a few days fixing lots of problems (both technical and data-related) as well as getting it (mostly) on par with the Vulkan hardware database and the changes are now live. [Read More]

A bit later than initially planned Vulkan 1.1 was released to the public yesterday, as usual with day-one driver support by most of the IHVs. Vulkan 1.1 promoted several extension to the core and also adds interesting new functionality like vendor independent subgroup operations. You can get all the details at the Khronos Vulkan landing page. Note that all my open source examples, demos and applications will work fine with Vulkan 1. [Read More]

I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples that demonstrates the basic use of conservative rasterization using the VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization extension. This has been missing from Vulkan some time now (while other APIs already offer this feature) but has recently been added and is already support by at least NVIDIA. Conservative rasterization changes the way fragments are generated, and enabling over estimation generates fragments for every pixel touched instead of only pixels that are fully covered. [Read More]

One of the most common Vulkan related that I’m seeing a lot is about rendering stuff that somehow ends up being not visible on the screen, even though technically everything looks okay (no validation layer errors, correct buffer uploads, etc.). Luckily there are debugging tools tools like RenderDoc that can help locating and fixing such problems. But not everyone knows about such tools or how to use them for debugging these kind of problems. [Read More]

I have released the first working version of a separate (from the examples) Vulkan physical based rendering example that uses the glTF 2.0 model file format. The repository can be found at https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan-glTF-PBR. glTF is a royalty free format specification by the Khronos Group and is a new format for 3D models gaining lots of traction. With version 2.0 it also added several PBR extensions and definitions. I decided to make this a stand-alone project instead of “just” another example in my Vulkan C++ example repository to make it easier getting into the code. [Read More]

In what is most probably my last Vulkan example for 2017 I have added a cascaded shadow mapping example to my open source Vulkan C++ example repository: One big problem of traditional shadow mapping, esp. with large outdoor scenes is the resolution you get as one single shadow map has to cover the whole camera spectrum. With cascaded shadow maps the frustum is split up into multiple frustums (along scene depth) with each getting it’s own, full-resolution, depth map. [Read More]

Upon popular request I finally got around combining android device data from my Vulkan and OpenGL ES hardware databases into a convenient table. This should be handy if you plan on supporting both apis on Vulkan or if you just need to check for general device support. The new page can be reached via https://android.gpuinfo.org/ It combines all android device reports from the Vulkan database with all reports from the OpenGL ES database and also uses google’s official device list for translating device IDs (stored with Vulkan and OpenGL ES reports) into actual retail names. [Read More]

I have just added two minimal, mostly self-contained cross-platform headless Vulkan examples to my open source C++ Vulkan repository. Unlike the other examples in my repository these two don’t require a surface (created from a window) and as such can be run on systems with no window compositor. The intention behind the two examples is to show how Vulkan can be used for running graphics and compute tasks without the need for an actual user interface to be present i. [Read More]

Starting point With my Vulkan C++ example github repository approaching 200 MB in size I decided it was about time to shrink it down to a reasonable size again. Shrinking a git(hub) repository isn’t just about deleting locally present files but requires cleaning up the history as files that have been removed are still present in the repository’s history and therefore still contribute to it’s size. A big chunk of the repo’s size is caused by binary assets like textures and 3d models. [Read More]