Khronos royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Machine Learning, and Vision Processing

At XDC 2025 in Vienna, Austria, LunarG proudly showcased KosmicKrisp, a groundbreaking Vulkan-to-Metal Mesa driver designed to bring Vulkan 1.3 conformance to Apple Silicon platforms. Led by Aitor Camacho Larrondo, this innovative project marks a significant milestone in enabling high-performance graphics and compute workloads on macOS, aligning Vulkan capabilities with the power of Apple’s M1-series and beyond.

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. With the release of Autodesk VRED 2026, Autodesk introduced a Vulkan renderer alongside the traditional OpenGL real-time pipeline, addressing fundamental limitations while introducing hybrid ray tracing capabilities that significantly enhance visual quality in real-time scenarios on workstations. In this case study, we look at how Autodesk VRED team broke through complex barriers using Vulkan, implemented hybrid ray-tracing, and enabled live referencing using VRED's Vulkan renderer and Autodesk Alias viewport. 

In Imagination's latest version of their Linux and Android Driver Development Kits, changes include: 

• VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix - This extension provides Vulkan developers with a standardised and widely supported way to handle cooperative matrix operations, which are particularly useful for high-performance matmul in compute shaders.
• An overhaul of their Vulkan driver’s shader and pipeline compilation process. 
• OpenCL extensions - Developers can now use pinned memory via CL_USE_HOST_PTR and CL_ALLOC_HOST_PTR, proving an effective tool for bandwidth-intensive applications, repetitive transfers and memory transfer limited segments of applications.

Imagination's open-source driver stack for PowerVR has reached a new milestone with the upstreaming of their Linux kernal driver and contributing their Vulkan 1.2 code to Mesa. With the release of Mesa 25.3, the developer community will have access to Imagination's fully functional open-source Vulkan driver. 

LunarG has announced the release of Vulkan SDK 1.4.328 with smarter configuration options, refined validation, and seamless integration across ecosystem. The release includes a new “Vulkan Drivers” tab, canonicalize-ids in spirv-opt, four new powerful extensions, enhanced validation coverage, and more…

OpenColorIO, an open-source color management solution for film, animation and visual effects, has added support for the Vulkan API. Included in the OpenColorIO 2.5 release, is now support for the Vulkan API, a hue curve transform option, ACES 2 configurations, and new color space attributes for better interoperability.