April 2019 meetup

We're meeting again -- in a new place, with some new and some old faces! Our April meetup will take place in the Google Engineering Center Munich -- and we'd like to thank Google for generously hosting us in their event space and providing us with food & drinks!

We've got a few talks lined up, so stay tuned for updates. Let's start with our first talk: Marc-Anton Boehm-von Thenen (also known as @dottideveloper on Twitter) will shed some more light on SPIR-V in production in his talk:

How to: Lightweight material pipeline; Using the SPIRV-Toolchain

Writing shaders and composing materials based on the Vulkan pipeline for your graphics framework can be a nerve wrecking and annoying job. Is the vertex input signature correct or compatible? Is the pipeline layout matching? What about subpass inputs?

Automating the way from GLSL shaders to Vulkan graphics pipelines is the way to go but not a gift. I am here to help. Let me introduce you into #ShirabeEngine's approach to compile a set of shaders into Vulkan compatible material data structures.

Meet the Shirabe Engine Material Pipeline and the SPIRV-Toolchain.

For our second talk, it's my pleasure to announce Morris Hafner (known on Twitter as @mmhafner) coming from Codeplay in Edinborough to us to discuss SYCL:

Programming GPUs with SYCL and modern C++

SYCL is a single source heterogeneous programming model developed by the Khronos Group that provides a high-level interface for OpenCL using modern C++. This enables programmers to leverage the expressiveness of C++ on their GPUs and keep the necessary boilerplate to a minimum. In this talk, we will look at the history and future of SYCL, the ecosystem and what it means for parallel and heterogeneous programming in C++. We will conclude it by writing a small demo application that shows how GPU developers can take advantage of the freshly gained high-level language constructs to write safer, faster and more composable code.

Last but not least, Sharif from Google will be covering Stadia -- Google's new cloud gaming platform using Vulkan! He'll provide a high level introduction to cloud gaming on Stadia.