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+--- Thread: Vulkan Raytracing Launched (/thread-94113.html)
Vulkan Raytracing Launched - xSicKxBot - 03-19-2020
Vulkan Raytracing Launched
<div><p>Today at not-GDC, Khronos Group announced the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing, with initial support via beta drivers to NVidia cards.</p>
<p>Details from the <a href="https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-group-releases-vulkan-ray-tracing">Vulkan announcement</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Vulkan Ray Tracing consists of a number of Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL extensions, some of which are optional. The primary <a href="https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.2-extensions/html/vkspec.html#VK_KHR_ray_tracing">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. <a href="https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.2-extensions/html/vkspec.html#VK_KHR_pipeline_library">VK_KHR_pipeline_library</a> provides the ability to provide a set of shaders which can be efficiently linked into ray tracing pipelines. <a href="https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.2-extensions/html/vkspec.html#VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations">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>
<p>Vulkan Ray Tracing shaders are SPIR-V binaries which use two new extensions. The <a href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Registry/blob/master/extensions/KHR/SPV_KHR_ray_tracing.html">SPV_KHR_ray_tracing</a> SPIR-V extension adds support for ray tracing shader stages and instructions; <a href="https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Registry/blob/master/extensions/KHR/SPV_KHR_ray_query.html">SPV_KHR_ray_query</a> adds support for ray query shader instructions. Developers can generate those binaries in GLSL using two new GLSL extensions, <a href="https://github.com/KhronosGroup/GLSL/blob/master/extensions/ext/GLSL_EXT_ray_tracing.txt">GLSL_EXT_ray_tracing</a> and <a href="https://github.com/KhronosGroup/GLSL/blob/master/extensions/ext/GLSL_EXT_ray_query.txt">GLSL_EXT_ray_query</a>, which are supported in the open source <a href="https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/">glslang</a> compiler. Engineers at Khronos member companies, including NVIDIA, have also <a href="https://devblogs.nvidia.com/bringing-hlsl-ray-tracing-to-vulkan/">added support for the SPIR-V</a> extensions to <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler">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>
</blockquote>
<p>Beta drivers are available from <a href="https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver">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 <a href="https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/apis/Vulkan-Ray-Tracing-Launch-Mar20.pdf">20 page pdf presentation</a>, as well as a more in-depth technical overview of raytracing support in <a href="https://www.khronos.org/blog/ray-tracing-in-vulkan">this blog post</a>.</p>
<p>You can learn more about raytracing support in Vulkan in the <a href="https://youtu.be/bzE3cxg4Uek">video</a> below.</p>
<p align="center">[embedded content] </p>
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https://www.sickgaming.net/blog/2020/03/17/vulkan-raytracing-launched/