Stefan Mileschin

Cross-platform, cross-vendor ray tracing

The Khronos Group has added Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions to Vulkan API, creating the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross platform standard for ray tracing acceleration.

According to details provided by The Khronos Group, the Vulkan Ray Tracing will include several Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL extensions, some of which are optional. Vulkan Ray Tracing will integrate ray tracing framework into the Vulkan API, allowing developers to merge rasterization with ray tracing acceleration.

The Khronos Group was keen to note that the Vulkan Ray Tracing is designed to be hardware agnostic, meaning it can be accelerated on both existing GPU compute as well as dedicated ray tracing cores.

Currently, Vulkan Ray Tracing is available as provisional extensions over at the Vulkan Registry, allowing developers to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected on the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and the Khronos Developer Slack.

"There has been strong developer demand for a truly cross-platform ray tracing acceleration API and now Vulkan Ray Tracing is here to meet that industry need," said Daniel Koch, senior graphics system software engineer at NVIDIA and Vulkan Ray Tracing task sub group chair at Khronos. "The overall architecture of Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to users of existing proprietary ray tracing APIs, which enables straightforward porting of existing ray traced content, but this framework also introduces new functionality and implementation flexibility."

https://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/5...an-ray-tracing