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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. 

Khronos Advisor, Dr. Moritz Lehmann, simulated a crow in flight at 680M grid cells in 36GB VRAM, pooled together from

• AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT 12GB (RDNA3)
• Intel Arc B580 12GB (Battlemage)
• Nvidia Titan Xp 12GB (Pascal)

Finally you can "SLI" AMD+Intel+Nvidia GPUs at home! Lehmann's FluidX3D CFD software can pool the VRAM of any combination of any GPUs together, as long as VRAM capacity and bandwidth are similar. The black magic that makes this possible is OpenCL. All GPUs show up as OpenCL devices, and FluidX3D can split the simulation box into multiple domains, each simulated and rendered by one of the GPUs.

The Khronos OpenCL Working Group is happy to announce the release of the OpenCL specifications v3.0.19. This maintenance update adds numerous bug fixes and clarifications and adds two new extensions: cl_khr_spirv_queries to simplify querying the SPIR-V capabilities of a device, and cl_khr_external_memory_android_hardware_buffer to more efficiently interoperate with other APIs on Android devices.  In addition, the cl_khr_kernel_clock extension to sample a clock within a kernel has been finalized and is no longer an experimental extension.

Today, with the release of version 1.4.321 of the Vulkan specification, Vulkan Video is once again being expanded for encoding operations with the introduction of the Encode Intra-refresh extension—the second advanced feature extension for encoding, following the earlier release of Encode Quantization Map. Intra-refresh is a valuable tool for enhancing video playback robustness in the presence of network errors. As a result, it is commonly used in broadcast streams, wireless video transmission, VoIP calls, and many other streaming applications.

Today, The Khronos Group announced it will bring the Vulkanised developer conference to San Diego, CA on February 9-11, 2026. Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan API and is a unique technical event that brings the Vulkan community together to exchange ideas, solve problems, and help steer the future development of the Vulkan API and ecosystem.

Khronos has issued a public call for talks and is seeking submissions from application developers, Vulkan implementers, engine and framework builders, thought leaders, researchers, educators, and open-source tool providers who are eager to share their experiences for the benefit of the Vulkan community. Vulkanised provides a great opportunity for Vulkan experts to share their work, ideas, and unique perspectives with peers in the Vulkan ecosystem. The deadline for submissions is Sunday, October 12, 2025. 

Synchronization in Vulkan® has long been one of its most notorious challenges, something developers haven’t been shy about reminding us. The Khronos® Vulkan Working Group has been steadily working to make Vulkan a joy to use, and simplifying the synchronization model has been high on our priority list. One of the most frequent developer frustrations has been the complexity of managing image layouts, a pain point we’re tackling head-on with the new VK_KHR_unified_image_layouts extension, which aims to eliminate the need for most layout transitions entirely.