We are happy to announce that The Qt Company has joined as a contributor member to the Khronos Group. The Khronos Group is a not for profit industry consortium with over 100 member companies working together with open standards for the authoring and acceleration of parallel computing, graphics, dynamic media, computer vision and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications and have early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. As a member we are able to work even closer with Khronos and its members to make sure Qt is a spearhead implementation of the most relevant Khronos APIs.

From Qt perspective the most prominent Khronos standard has been OpenGL, which provides a powerful, low-level interface between software and acceleration hardware, and it is operating system and window system independent and therefore it has been a good foundation for a cross-platform development framework. For a long time Qt has offered and easy way to integrate OpenGL content to the applications and starting from Qt version 5.0 OpenGL has been the foundation of Qt graphics architecture. Qt has been also actively developing technologies on top of other Khronos standards such as WebGL for a Javascript API for rendering 3D and glTF for streamlining the 3D content loading especially in embedded devices and OpenCL for parallel programming.

Today Khronos has announced a new API called Vulkan which is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API for modern GPUs. As we expect that Vulkan will quickly gain strong foothold and driver support we are actively working on implementing the Qt support for Vulkan together with the Qt community, our partners and other members of the Khronos Group.