Khronos

Khronos Group, commonly referred to as Khronos, is an international non-profit consortium that develops open, royalty-free standards for graphics, compute, vision, and multimedia across platforms and devices. The organization coordinates the creation of specifications to enable software to run on a wide range of hardware, from desktops and mobile devices to embedded systems and web browsers. Khronos traces its roots to the OpenGL Architecture Review Board and, in 2000, reorganized as Khronos to standardize APIs beyond OpenGL.

The group governs itself through member companies and working groups, with governance and progress driven by a consensus-based process. It maintains public interfaces and conformance programs that provide test suites to certify compliant implementations and ensure cross-vendor interoperability. Khronos specifications are designed to be broadly adopted by hardware vendors, software developers, and platform creators.

Notable Khronos standards include OpenGL and OpenGL ES for graphics; Vulkan, a low-overhead cross-platform API for high-performance graphics and compute; WebGL for rendering 3D graphics in web browsers; OpenCL for heterogeneous computing; OpenXR for augmented and virtual reality; SPIR-V as an intermediate representation for shading and compute; and glTF as a portable 3D asset format. These standards underpin a wide range of applications, from video games and professional visualization to web-based graphics and immersive experiences.

Impact and adoption of Khronos standards are extensive, with major hardware vendors, software developers, and game engines supporting or implementing the specifications. The consortium continues to publish new specifications and extensions aligned with evolving computing and graphics needs.