Vulkan adds support for ray tracing content

Khronos has responded to developer demand and today introduced the Ray Tracing interim extensions in Vulkan. You'll notice the word "tentative" in the Khronos description, which means the developers give their opinion through their GitHub and Slack channels before the specs are finalized.

Vulkan announces its support for Ray Tracing for any GPU without restriction

The especially important features of Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions are that it is an open, multi-vendor, platform solution for 'ray tracing' accelerations. That said, the first launch will be aimed at desktop computers, which are the platform on which GPUs and cores dedicated to Ray Tracing will proliferate the most. Vulkan Ray Tracing is designed to be hardware agnostic and therefore can be accelerated through any processing path.

Daniel Koch, Senior Graphics Systems Software Engineer at Nvidia and Chairman of Vulkan's Ray Tracing Task Subgroup in Khronos, explained that the new cross-platform API won't be that difficult to use. "The overall architecture of Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to users of existing proprietary ray tracing APIs, enabling direct portability of existing Ray Tracing content, but this framework also introduces new functionality and deployment flexibility." Koch commented.

Visit our guide on the best graphics cards on the market

Khronos includes statements of support from AMD, EA, Epic Games, IMG, and Intel. We will keep you informed.

Mydrivershexus font