 | |
| Industry | Software industry, computer graphics |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Colorado, United States [1] |
| Website | lunarg |
LunarG is a software company specializing in device driver development for video cards.
| | |
| Industry | Software industry, computer graphics |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Colorado, United States [1] |
| Website | lunarg |
LunarG is a software company specializing in device driver development for video cards.
In 2001, Jens Owen cofounded Tungsten Graphics, [2] a software company working on video card drivers, which among other things, developed the Gallium3D framework for graphics drivers. The company was acquired by VMware in 2008; [3] a year later, Jens Owen along with Alan Ward founded LunarG to continue this work. [4]
In November 2015, LunarG announced that the company is splitting into two groups. The desktop group, funded by Valve, will continue as LunarG. The mobile group will move to Google, presumably to work on Vulkan support on Android. [5] [6] This split follows Google's announcement from August 2015 that Vulkan would be supported by the Android platform. [7]
LunarG is developing tools and infrastructure for the Vulkan graphics API, designed to be the successor for OpenGL, [8] with sponsorship from Valve. This includes an open source SDK for Vulkan, released together with the finalised Vulkan 1.0 specification. This SDK includes tools for developing Vulkan applications on Windows and Linux, including the official Khronos driver loader, validation layers, debugging and tracing tools. [9] [10] During the development of the Vulkan standard, LunarG independently developed a Vulkan-compatible runtime and driver for Intel HD Graphics chips, [11] [12] although the official driver is developed by Intel. [13] [14]
Since 2014, LunarG is working with Valve to improve the graphics driver stack on Linux, in particular, Mesa [15] [16] and the driver for Intel HD Graphics. [17] [18] As a showcase, they also developed a separate unofficial driver for HD Graphics called the "ILO", based on Gallium3D. [19] [20]
OpenGL is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.
Radeon is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Technologies, which was acquired by AMD in 2006 for US$5.4 billion.
OpenVG is an API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. Its primary platforms are mobile phones, gaming & media consoles and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to help manufacturers create more attractive user interfaces by offloading computationally intensive graphics processing from the CPU onto a GPU to save energy. OpenVG is well suited to accelerating Flash and mobile profile of SVG sequences. The OpenGL ES library provides similar functionality for 3D graphics. OpenVG is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.
OpenGL for Embedded Systems is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accelerated using a graphics processing unit (GPU). It is designed for embedded systems like smartphones, tablet computers, video game consoles and PDAs. OpenGL ES is the "most widely deployed 3D graphics API in history".
Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open-source software implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers.
A free and open-source graphics device driver is a software stack which controls computer-graphics hardware and supports graphics-rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) and is released under a free and open-source software license. Graphics device drivers are written for specific hardware to work within a specific operating system kernel and to support a range of APIs used by applications to access the graphics hardware. They may also control output to the display if the display driver is part of the graphics hardware. Most free and open-source graphics device drivers are developed by the Mesa project. The driver is made up of a compiler, a rendering API, and software which manages access to the graphics hardware.
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OpenCL is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies programming languages for programming these devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based parallelism.
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Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library distributed under the MIT License. VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia.
Mode setting is a software operation that activates a display mode for a computer's display controller by using VESA BIOS Extensions or UEFI Graphics extensions.
Intel Graphics Technology (GT) is the collective name for a series of integrated graphics processors (IGPs) produced by Intel that are manufactured on the same package or die as the central processing unit (CPU). It was first introduced in 2010 as Intel HD Graphics and renamed in 2017 as Intel UHD Graphics.
The Radeon HD 8000 series is a family of computer GPUs developed by AMD. AMD was initially rumored to release the family in the second quarter of 2013, with the cards manufactured on a 28 nm process and making use of the improved Graphics Core Next architecture. However the 8000 series turned out to be an OEM rebadge of the 7000 series.
Mir is a computer display server and, recently, a Wayland compositor for the Linux operating system that is under development by Canonical Ltd. It was planned to replace the currently used X Window System for Ubuntu,; however, the plan changed and Mutter was adopted as part of GNOME Shell.
Video Code Engine is AMD's video encoding ASIC implementing the video codec H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. Since 2012 it is integrated into all of their GPUs and APUs except Oland.
GPU virtualization refers to technologies that allow the use of a GPU to accelerate graphics or GPGPU applications running on a virtual machine. GPU virtualization is used in various applications such as desktop virtualization, cloud gaming and computational science.
Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform API, open standard for 3D graphics and computing. Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media. Compared to OpenGL, Direct3D 11 and Metal, Vulkan is intended to offer higher performance and more balanced CPU and GPU usage and provides a considerably lower-level API and parallel tasking for the application. In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan is designed to allow developers to better distribute work among multiple CPU cores.
Nvidia NVDEC is a feature in its graphics cards that performs video decoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the CPU.
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