The Khronos Group - Connecting Software to Silicon
The Khronos Group is a not for profit industry consortium creating 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. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.
OpenGL - The Industry Standard for High Performance Graphics
OpenGL® is the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API in the industry, bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. It is window-system and operating-system independent as well as network-transparent. OpenGL enables developers of software for PC, workstation, and supercomputing hardware to create high-performance, visually compelling graphics software applications, in markets such as CAD, content creation, energy, entertainment, game development, manufacturing, medical, and virtual reality. OpenGL exposes all the features of the latest graphics hardware.
OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems
OpenCLâ„¢ is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.
OpenGL ES - The Standard for Embedded 3D Graphics
OpenGL® ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL™ specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics. OpenGL SC is tuned for the safety critical market.
EGL - Native Platform Interface
EGLâ„¢ is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs.
WebGL - OpenGL ES 2.0 for the Web
WebGL is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that brings OpenGL ES 2.0 to the web as a 3D drawing context within HTML, exposed as low-level Document Object Model interfaces. It uses the OpenGL shading language, GLSL ES, and can be cleanly combined with other web content that is layered on top or underneath the 3D content. It is ideally suited for dynamic 3D web applications in the JavaScript programming language, and will be fully integrated in leading web browsers.
WebCL - Heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 web browsers
The WebCL working group is working to define a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL standard for heterogeneous parallel computing. WebCL will enable web applications to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from within a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games. WebCL is being developed in close cooperation with the Web community and has the potential to extend the capabilities of HTML5 browsers to accelerate computationally intensive and rich visual computing applications.
COLLADA - Digital Asset and FX Exchange Schema
COLLADAâ„¢ defines an XML-based schema to make it easy to transport 3D assets between applications - enabling diverse 3D authoring and content processing tools be combined into a production pipeline. The intermediate language provides comprehensive encoding of visual scenes including: geometry, shaders and effects, physics, animation, kinematics, and even multiple version representations of the same asset.COLLADA FX enables leading 3D authoring tools to work effectively together to create shader and effects applications and assets to be authored and packaged using OpenGL® Shading Language, Cg, CgFX, and DirectX® FX
OpenVG - The Standard for Vector Graphics Acceleration
OpenVGâ„¢ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides a low-level hardware acceleration interface for vector graphics libraries such as Flash and SVG. OpenVG is targeted primarily at handheld devices that require portable acceleration of high-quality vector graphics for compelling user interfaces and text on small screen devices - while enabling hardware acceleration to provide fluidly interactive performance at very low power levels.
OpenSL ES - The Standard for Embedded Audio Acceleration
OpenSL ESâ„¢ is a royalty-free, cross-platform, hardware-accelerated audio API tuned for embedded systems. It provides a standardized, high-performance, low-latency method to access audio functionality for developers of native applications on embedded mobile multimedia devices, enabling straightforward cross-platform deployment of hardware and software audio capabilities, reducing implementation effort, and promoting the market for advanced audio.
OpenMAX IL - The Standard for Media Library Portability
OpenMAXâ„¢ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.
OpenMAX AL - The Standard for Media Library Portability
OpenMAXâ„¢ is a royalty-free, cross-platform API that provides comprehensive streaming media codec and application portability by enabling accelerated multimedia components to be developed, integrated and programmed across multiple operating systems and silicon platforms. The OpenMAX API will be shipped with processors to enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full acceleration potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.
Vision - Hardware acceleration API for Computer Vision applications and libraries
Computer vision has become an essential component of many modern applications including gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, automatic driver assistance, biometrics, computational photography, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more. The Khronos vision working group has been formed to drive industry consensus to create a cross-platform API standard to enable hardware vendors to implement and optimize accelerated computer vision algorithms. The Khronos vision API can accelerate high-level libraries, such as the popular OpenCV open source vision library, or be used by applications directly. A strong focus of the working group will be on providing computer vision on mobile and embedded systems and enabling acceleration on a wide variety of computing architectures including CPUs, GPUs and DSPs. The vision API will also explore interoperability with existing Khronos standards for camera control, video processing, compute acceleration and graphics rendering.
Other Khronos Group APIs and Technologies
The Khronos Group manages other APIs and Technologies:
OpenGL SC - Safety Critical Profile OpenMAX DL - The Standard for Media Library Portability OpenKODE - Khronos Open Development Environment OpenWF - The Standard for building composited windowing systems OpenML - The Standard for Dynamic Media Authoring
OpenGL ES - The Standard for Embedded Accelerated 3D Graphics
OpenGL® ES is a royalty-free, cross-platform API for full-function 2D and 3D graphics on embedded systems - including consoles, phones, appliances and vehicles. It consists of well-defined subsets of desktop OpenGL, creating a flexible and powerful low-level interface between software and graphics acceleration. OpenGL ES includes profiles for floating-point and fixed-point systems and the EGL™ specification for portably binding to native windowing systems. OpenGL ES 1.X is for fixed function hardware and offers acceleration, image quality and performance. OpenGL ES 2.X enables full programmable 3D graphics. OpenGL SC is tuned for the safety critical market.
OpenGL ES API Profiles and Versions at a Glance
OpenGL ES 1.X
For fixed function hardware: OpenGL ES 1.1 is defined relative to the OpenGL 1.5 specification and emphasizes hardware acceleration of the API, but is fully backwards compatible with 1.0. It provides enhanced functionality, improved image quality and optimizations to increase performance while reducing memory bandwidth usage to save power. The OpenGL ES 1.1 Extension Pack is a collection of optional extensions added to OpenGL ES 1.1 that reduced variability and bring significant improvements in image quality and performance. Learn More...
OpenGL ES 2.X - for Programmable Hardware
For programmable hardware: OpenGL ES 2.0 is defined relative to the OpenGL 2.0 specification and emphasizes a programmable 3D graphics pipeline with the ability to create shader and program objects and the ability to write vertex and fragment shaders in the OpenGL ES Shading Language. OpenGL ES 2.0 does not support the fixed function transformation and fragment pipeline of OpenGL ES 1.x. Learn More...
OpenGL ES in Detail:
Royalty free 2D/3D API consisting of well-defined subset profiles of desktop OpenGL
OpenGL® ES is a low-level, lightweight API for advanced embedded graphics using well-defined subset profiles of OpenGL. It provides a low-level applications programming interface (API) between software applications and hardware or software graphics engines.
This standard 3D graphics API for embedded systems makes it easy and affordable to offer a variety of advanced 3D graphics and games across all major mobile and embedded platforms. Since OpenGL ES (OpenGL for Embedded Systems) is based on OpenGL, no new technologies are needed. This ensures synergy with, and a migration path to and from desktop OpenGL -- the most widely adopted cross-platform graphics API.
Developer Advantages
Industry Standard and Royalty Free
Anyone can download the OpenGL ES specification and implement and ship products based on OpenGL ES. With broad industry support, OpenGL ES is the only truly open, vendor-neutral, multi-platform embedded graphics standard. The standardized higher level of abstraction that it offers means developers can concentrate more on content and less on the minor code and platform details. Small footprint & low power consumption
The embedded space varies widely, ranging from 400Mhz PDAs with 64MB RAM to 50MHz mobile phones with 1 MB RAM. OpenGL ES is designed to accommodate these differences by requiring a minimum footprint with minimum data storage requirements, minimized instruction/data traffic, and is both integer and floating point friendly. For users this means smaller binaries to download that take up less storage on the device. Seamless transition from software to hardware rendering
Although the OpenGL ES specification defines a particular graphics processing pipeline, individual calls can be executed on dedicated hardware, run as software routines on the system CPU, or implemented as a combination of both dedicated hardware and software routines. This means that software developers can ship a conformant software 3D engine today, that lets applications and tools seamlessly transition over to using OpenGL ES hardware-acceleration in higher powered devices. Extensible & Evolving
OpenGL ES allows new hardware innovations to be accessible through the API via the OpenGL extension mechanism and for the API to be easily updated. As extensions become widely accepted, they are considered for inclusion into the core OpenGL ES standard. This process allows OpenGL ES to evolve in a controlled yet innovative manner. Easy to use
Based on OpenGL, OpenGL ES is well structured with an intuitive design and logical commands. Well-documented
Because OpenGL ES is based on OpenGL, there are numerous relevant books, and a great deal of relevant sample code, making information about OpenGL ES inexpensive and easy to find. With the introduction of OpenGL ES, a developer can now write basically the same code for cell phones to supercomputers.
Conformance Testing
Specifications are reviewed and revised on a yearly basis. To label an implementation as an OpenGL ES compliant implementation, the implementation must pass a set of conformance tests. The conformance test definitions are maintained as a separate part of the OpenGL ES documentation.
The OpenGL ES Two Track Roadmap
The OpenGL ES roadmap has been tailored to the diverse needs of the embedded industry and contains two tracks with "1.X" and "2.X" specification roadmaps that will evolve in parallel. The 1.X roadmap will continue to be developed for new-generation fixed function 3D accelerators while the 2.X roadmap will enable emerging programmable 3D pipelines. This dual-track roadmap enables OpenGL ES to meet the graphics requirements of a huge range of 3D enabled device and platforms in embedded markets - from low-end cell-phones to high-end gaming consoles. Khronos is committed to providing backwards compatibility between successive versions of the APIs in each of the 1.X and 2.X tracks to ensure that applications can be trivially ported from one version to the next.
The OpenGL ES Framework
Profiles:
The OpenGL ES specification includes the definition of several profiles. Each profile is a subset of a version of the desktop OpenGL specification plus some additional OpenGL ES-specific extensions. The OpenGL ES profiles are part of a wider family of OpenGL-derived application programming interfaces. As such, the profiles share a similar processing pipeline, command structure, and the same OpenGL name space. Where necessary, extensions are created to augment the existing desktop OpenGL functionality. OpenGL ES-specific extensions play a role in OpenGL ES profiles similar to that played by OpenGL ARB extensions relative to the OpenGL specification. OpenGL ES-specific extensions are either precursors of functionality destined for inclusion in future core profile revisions, or formalization of important but non-mainstream functionality. Each profile definition implies a distinct header file and link/runtime library defining the commands and tokens in the profile. To simplify maintenance a single superset header can be defined with appropriate conditional preprocessing directives to control the visibility of tokens and command prototypes. At run-time an application can determine which profile is running using the OpenGL version string query.
The Common Profile is intended for consumer entertainment and related devices such as telephone handsets, PDAs, set-top boxes, game consoles, etc. It addresses the broadest range of the market including support for platforms with varying capability.
Minimum footprint full function 3D with texture-mapping Good gaming platform Implementable on cell phones
The Safety Critical Profile is intended for consumer and industrial applications where reliability and certifiability are the primary constraints.
Absolute minimum 3D to ease safety certifications Used in avionics and automotive displays
Extensions:
OpenGL ES implementations may include extensions that add new features to the implementation. An OpenGL ES profile consists of two parts: a subset of the full OpenGL pipeline, and some extended functionality that is drawn from a set of OpenGL ES-specific extensions to the full OpenGL specification. Each extension is pruned to match the profile's command subset and added to the profile as either a core addition or a profile extension. Core additions differ from profile extensions in that the commands and tokens do not include extension suffixes in their names. Profile extensions are further divided into required (mandatory) and optional extensions. Required extensions must be implemented as part of a conforming implementation, whereas the implementation of optional extensions is left to the discretion of the implementor. Native Platform Graphics Interface Layer - EGL:
OpenGL ES also includes a specification of a common platform interface layer, called EGL. This layer is platform independent and may optionally be included as part of a vendor's OpenGL ES distribution. The platform binding also has an associated conformance test. Alternatively, a vendor may choose to define their own platform-specific embedding layer.
