Vulkan Ray Tracing SDK (1.2.162.0) By Khronos Is Ready To Launch

What are the developments on Vulkan Ray Tracing by Khronos?

The Khronos® Group, an open organization of industry-driving organizations making progressed co-action guidelines, reports that LunarG has delivered the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK), 1.2.162.0 version, a platform that supports the brand-new Vulkan Ray Tracing extension that includes Validation Layers and coordination of updated GLSL, HLSL, and SPIR-V shader toolchains.

The Khronos open-source Vulkan Samples and Vulkan Guide have been moved up to accompany Ray-Tracing technologies. At long last, shipments received from both AMD and NVIDIA, engineers are currently empowered to handily coordinate Vulkan Ray Tracing into their programs.

Khronos launched the final installment of Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions last month to flawlessly coordinate Ray-Tracing Functionality parallel to Vulkan’s rasterization framework, establishing Vulkan the business’s first unlatched, cross-seller, a cross-platform grade for Ray-Tracing acceleration. Vulkan Ray Tracing can be stationed utilizing existing GPU dedicated or compute Ray-Tracing cores.

The Vulkan SDK now incorporates all the pieces important for engineers to effectively utilize the new Ray-Tracing extensions, for example, the latest shader toolchains, without requiring them to be put up from various archives, and supports Ray-Tracing Validation inside the SDK validation layers.

Daniel Koch, Senior Graphics System Software Engineer at NVIDIA and Vulkan Ray Tracing TSG Cahir at Khronos, informed that Vulkan Ray-Tracing’s engineering ecosystem would benefit from the API specifications and developers will have more freedom in cross-platform Ray-Tracing acceleration.

Adding to his statement, Daniel Koch said that by transferring a precisely built superset of DXR and including Vulkan Ray-Tracing compatibility in DXC open-source HLSL compiler have served the request of developers to include DirectX 12 Ray-Tracing (DXR) into Vulkan.

As stated recently, the use of HLSL into Vulkan is accomplished through incorporating a SPIR-V backend straight into Microsoft’s open-source HLSL compiler, DXC. Engineers now can utilize HLSL shaders in Vulkan Ray-Tracing applications, including porting Ray-Tracing applications to Vulkan from DXR.

Vulkan is additionally used as a rear for layered executions of APIs, for example, DirectX 12. By the design of Vulkan Ray Tracing, difficult tasks, for example, vkd3d-Proton will have the option to effectively uphold layered DXR over Vulkan.

Vulkan drivers that incorporate the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions are transported for both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, beginning with the NVIDIA R460 and AMD Radeon Adrenalin 20.11.3 drivers for both the Quadroon and GeForce Windows and Linux. Intel Xe-HPG GPUs is to support Vulkan Ray-Tracing extensions, accessible from 2021, support for drivers will be provided via scheduled updates.

The Khronos Group is effectively checking engineer inputs on the Vulkan Ray-Tracing extension by the Vulkan affairs tracker on GitHub.

Sources: khronos, Vulkan SDK, Tools and Drivers are Ray Tracing Ready, 15th December 2020.