Today at not-GDC, Khronos Group announced the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing, with initial support via beta drivers to NVidia cards.<\/p>\n
Details from the Vulkan announcement<\/a>:<\/p>\n Vulkan Ray Tracing consists of a number of Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL extensions, some of which are optional. The primary VK_KHR_ray_tracing<\/a> extension provides support for acceleration structure building and management, ray tracing shader stages and pipelines, and ray query intrinsics for all shader stages. VK_KHR_pipeline_library<\/a> provides the ability to provide a set of shaders which can be efficiently linked into ray tracing pipelines. VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations<\/a> enables intensive driver operations, including ray tracing pipeline compilation or CPU-based acceleration structure construction to be offloaded to application-managed CPU thread pools.<\/p>\n Vulkan Ray Tracing shaders are SPIR-V binaries which use two new extensions. The SPV_KHR_ray_tracing<\/a> SPIR-V extension adds support for ray tracing shader stages and instructions; SPV_KHR_ray_query<\/a> adds support for ray query shader instructions. Developers can generate those binaries in GLSL using two new GLSL extensions, GLSL_EXT_ray_tracing<\/a> and GLSL_EXT_ray_query<\/a>, which are supported in the open source glslang<\/a> compiler. Engineers at Khronos member companies, including NVIDIA, have also added support for the SPIR-V<\/a> extensions to DXC<\/a>, Microsoft’s open source HLSL compiler, enabling Vulkan Ray Tracing SPIR-V shaders to be authored in HLSL using the syntax defined by Microsoft, with minimal modifications.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Beta drivers are available from NVidia here<\/a> although it should be cautioned, these drivers are very much for developers only! You can read more about the announcement in this 20 page pdf presentation<\/a>, as well as a more in-depth technical overview of raytracing support in this blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n You can learn more about raytracing support in Vulkan in the video<\/a> below.<\/p>\n [embedded content] <\/p>\n\n