LunarG

Last updated
LunarG
Industry Software industry, computer graphics
Founded2009;12 years ago (2009)
Headquarters Colorado, United States [1]
Website lunarg.com

LunarG is a software company specializing in device driver development for video cards.

Contents

History

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]

Projects

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]

Related Research Articles

OpenGL Cross-platform graphics API

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 ES Subset of the OpenGL API for embedded systems

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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.

Free and open-source graphics device driver Software stack controlling computer-graphics hardware and supporting graphics-rendering APIs under a free and open-source software license

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.

nouveau (software) Open source software driver for Nvidia GPU

nouveau is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees.

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OpenCL Open standard for programming heterogenous computing systems, such as CPUs or GPUs

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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.

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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.

MoltenVK is a software library which allows Vulkan applications to run on top of Metal on Apple's macOS, iOS, and tvOS operating systems. It is the first software component to be released for the Vulkan Portability Initiative, a project to have a subset of Vulkan run on platforms lacking native Vulkan drivers.

References

  1. "LunarG, Inc. business registration records". Colorado Secretary of State. Retrieved 11 November 2015.
  2. Brian Paul. "Mesa Introduction". mesa3d.org.
  3. David Marshall (16 December 2008). "VMware's year end acquisition of Tungsten Graphics". InfoWorld.
  4. Michael Larabel (18 October 2013). "LunarG Pushes Forward To Advance Open-Source Graphics". Phoronix.
  5. Michael Crider (25 November 2015). "Google Hires A Dedicated Team To Implement Support For The Vulkan Graphics API In Upcoming Versions Of Android". Android Police.
  6. Michael Larabel (11 November 2016). "Vulkan Experts LunarG Split Into Two, Mobile Guys Head To Google". Phoronix.
  7. Andrew Cunningham (10 August 2015). "Google goes with Vulkan as Android's low-overhead graphics API". Ars Technica.
  8. Tim Anderson (3 March 2015). "Here comes Vulkan: The next generation of the OpenGL graphics API". The Register.
  9. Ryan Smith (16 February 2016). "Vulkan 1.0 Specification Released: Drivers & Games Inbound". AnandTech.
  10. Brian Hoss (19 February 2016). "Graphics Shake-Up: Vulkan API Poised to Put More Rendering Power into Developers' Hands". High-Def Digest.
  11. Michael Larabel (3 April 2015). "How Open-Source Allowed Valve To Implement VULKAN Much Faster On The Source 2 Engine". Phoronix.
  12. Nick Farrell (6 March 2015). "Valve develops its own Intel graphics driver for Linux". fudzilla.com.
  13. Michael Larabel (16 February 2016). "Mesa Vulkan Branch Published For Intel Linux Support". Phoronix.
  14. Chris Hoffman (22 February 2016). "Valve's SteamOS now supports Vulkan, the cross-platform alternative to DirectX 12". PCWorld.
  15. "Valve Sponsored Mesa OpenGL Improvements Significantly Reduce Loading Times on Linux Games". gameskinny.com. 6 May 2014.
  16. "Valve fördert Verbesserungen an freien Grafiktreibern für Linux". heise.de . 11 June 2014.
  17. Silviu Stahie (6 November 2014). "Massive 20% Improvement to Land in Intel's Mesa Driver Thanks to Valve's Efforts". Softpedia .
  18. Ferdinand Thommes (6 November 2014). "Linux-Grafiktreiber: Intel erfährt dank LunarG massive Leistungssteigerung". ComputerBase.
  19. Michael Larabel (23 February 2014). "Intel Gallium3D Driver Continues Advancing". Phoronix.
  20. Michael Larabel (13 June 2014). "LunarG ILO Gallium3D vs. Intel's DRI Driver On Mesa 10.3-devel". Phoronix.