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.

The SYCL Working Group at Khronos has been hard at work advancing the ecosystem for this open, royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer, which enables code for heterogeneous and offload processors to be written using modern ISO C++. Through active public development, SYCL continues to grow as developers contribute and provide feedback, shaping the future of this portable programming model. Recently, the SYCL Working Group announced the release of Revision 11 of the SYCL 2020 Specification, introducing eight powerful new extensions alongside numerous specification clarifications that demonstrate the Working Group's continued commitment to advancing the specification for the benefit of both developers and implementers. In this blog, we'll share what's new in the latest revision, as well as where to learn more about SYCL at Supercomputing and how to get involved with the community.

The Khronos® OpenXR™ working group is pleased to announce the release of the Best Practices Validation Layer, now available in the OpenXR-SDK-Source repository. This new tool addresses a critical need in XR development: catching suboptimal API usage patterns that can lead to inconsistent behavior across different OpenXR runtimes.

The Khronos® ANARI™ Working Group recently wrapped up the ANARI Virtual Hackathon 2025, where developers, researchers, and visualization experts from around the world came together to explore what’s next for 3D rendering using the ANARI API. This year’s hackathon arrived at a pivotal time: the ANARI 1.1 specification has officially been ratified by the Khronos Board of Directors, marking a major milestone in the evolution of the industry’s first cross-platform 3D rendering engine API. ANARI 1.1 expands capabilities across geometry, spatial fields, and performance enhancements, and advances how developers and domain experts can leverage high-performance, vendor-neutral rendering.

Earlier this year, we shared how the Godot OpenXR Integration Project, developed in close collaboration with The Khronos® Group, was advancing OpenXR™ development through real-world testing and implementation. Today, I'm excited to provide an update on the significant progress we've made, with several major OpenXR features now production-ready and available to developers worldwide.

At Google Chrome, we're dedicated to advancing an open, capable, and instant web for everyone. This vision recently came to life through our partnership with Crayola and Red Games Co., bringing Crayola's beloved mobile app, Create and Play, to the web. Crayola's Create and Play, developed exclusively by Red Games Co., is the #1 iPad creativity app for kids on the Apple App Store and is praised for its blend of educational and artistic experiences

At Blender Studio, our projects are designed to do more than tell stories or create visuals—they function as production-driven R&D. Each film, asset, or tool is a proving ground that surfaces bugs, inspires new features, and tests Blender in real-world conditions. With Project Dogwalk, we expanded this model into game development. Our goal was to build a small, polished game in just four months using an open source pipeline, with Blender as the Digital Content Creation (DCC) hub, Godot as the game engine, and glTF™ as the exchange format at the center. glTF is the widely adopted 3D asset format from the Khronos® Group.

Overview 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. Vulkan® is a new-generation, open, royalty-free graphics and compute API from the Khronos® Group designed for high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs that is increasingly replacing the previous OpenGL® 3D AP