The Matrix Of Software Projects Mapping Khronos APIs From DXVK To Zink & CLVK

Neil Trevett, the president of the Khronos Group, presented at the X.Org Developers' Conference for the first time. During his presentation on Wednesday he covered their usual initiatives, how Khronos engages in open-source and open standards, and related bits -- plus a few interesting ones.

For the most part the presentation isn't really dramatic for any veteran developer or anyone reading Phoronix for enough years. Though he did re-affirm the commitment that "open-source is vital to build ecosystems around open API standards" -- yes, many of you will find that ironic with Trevett being employed by NVIDIA. On the Khronos front, they have continued engaging and pushing forward their conformance test suites (CTS) as open-source and that's been one of the exciting developments of recent years and ensuring better quality drivers.

This is my favorite slide from the presentation for showing the expansive ecosystem of SPIR-V as the intermediate representation ushered in by Vulkan and now also common to OpenCL and OpenGL. Many of the components outlined on the slide are open-source in nature.

What many will probably enjoy is this slide outlining the Khronos APIs and the different (also largely open-source) projects mapping one API to another. DXVK, VK9, and VKD3D are commonly covered on Phoronix but also Zink is important too for running OpenGL over Vulkan, the likes of CLSPV and CLVK are letting some OpenCL kernels run on Vulkan, and the MoltenVK / GFX-RS efforts are bringing Vulkan to Apple's Metal. Neil also notes there is growing interest in getting OpenCL/OpenGL running over Metal with Apple deprecating those APIs.

Those wanting to go through the Khronos + XDC2019 slide deck can find Neil's slides in PDF form.