The Khronos Group Celebrate 25 Years of Open Standards

Why It Matters

Open, consensus‑driven standards reduce fragmentation, accelerate innovation, and protect investments across gaming, AI, cloud and AR/VR markets.

Key Takeaways

• 25 years of industry‑driven open graphics standards
• Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenXR, glTF, OpenCL under Khronos
• Consortium unites competitors to prevent fragmentation
• New video series celebrates milestones and future roadmap
• Standards power gaming, AI, cloud, and AR/VR

Pulse Analysis

The Khronos Group’s quarter‑century milestone underscores the durability of a collaborative standards model in a fast‑moving tech landscape. By convening rival hardware vendors, software developers and platform providers, Khronos has produced APIs that become de‑facto foundations for graphics rendering, compute workloads and immersive experiences. This governance structure not only ensures backward compatibility but also accelerates the adoption of cutting‑edge features, allowing developers to target a single, open interface rather than multiple proprietary stacks.

Beyond gaming on Linux, Khronos standards now underpin a spectrum of industries—from real‑time ray tracing in film production to machine‑learning inference on heterogeneous GPUs, and from cloud‑based rendering farms to cross‑platform AR/VR applications via OpenXR. The open nature of Vulkan, for example, has lowered entry barriers for independent studios while enabling large‑scale titles to achieve high performance across devices. Similarly, glTF’s efficient asset format has become the lingua franca for 3D content exchange, driving e‑commerce, digital twins and metaverse initiatives.

Looking ahead, Khronos continues to expand its portfolio with initiatives like WebGPU, which promises native‑speed graphics in browsers, and extensions to OpenCL that target emerging AI accelerators. Companies that align with these open standards gain strategic flexibility, future‑proofing their products against vendor lock‑in and rapid hardware evolution. As the ecosystem evolves, the consortium’s emphasis on consensus‑driven development will remain a critical catalyst for interoperability and innovation across the broader digital economy.

The Khronos Group celebrate 25 years of open standards

By Liam Dawe · 10 Feb 2026 at 3:07 pm UTC

The Khronos Group have released a series of videos today to celebrate 25 years of open standards like OpenGL, Vulkan and more.

Who are The Khronos Group? They're the member‑driven consortium that oversees many things we rely on for not just gaming on Linux but all sorts of industries. They're the ones pushing for open standards, and keeping them all up to date as they work with various companies and other organisations on the likes of: OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenXR, Vulkan, glTF, OpenCL and more – it's a long list.

See one of the videos below with Khronos Group president Neil Trevett:

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From their blog post:

Twenty‑five years ago, a group of competitors faced a choice that would reshape visual computing. Smartphones, GPU acceleration, and cloud computing hadn't yet emerged, but the founders of Khronos stood at the forefront of nascent technologies poised to transform how billions of people experience the digital world. United by a critical belief—that without consensus‑driven interoperability standards, fragmentation and duplicated effort would severely limit these transformative innovations—they chose collaboration over competition, because open standards only work when built by the industry they serve.

It's hard to imagine where we would be now without Vulkan.

See the full post with the rest of the videos on the Khronos Group website: https://www.khronos.org/blog/the-khronos-group-celebrates-25-years-shaping-the-future-through-open-standards

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.