On April 27, 2023 the Vulkan® Ray Tracing TSG released the VK_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch extension, which exposes the ability to fetch vertex positions from an acceleration structure hit when tracing rays. The SPIR-V SPV_KHR_ray_tracing_position_fetch and GLSL GL_EXT_ray_tracing_position_fetch extensions have also been released to provide SPIR-V and GLSL support for this functionality.
The position of scene geometry is provided to ray tracing acceleration structures at build time and they include a derived form of the positions to enable efficient ray tracing and queries. Applications frequently require the position or a derived attribute of a triangle on a hit. For example, the geometric normal of the hit can be used as a biased ray origin for shadow rays in path tracers to prevent self intersection. The Ray Tracing Position Fetch extension enables direct retrieval of position and attribute information to avoid duplication of geometry data storage.
Portal with RTX reimagines Valve’s classic game with full Vulkan ray tracing. Building on NVIDIA’s previous upgrades to Quake II RTX and Minecraft with RTX, this new release has been created with the NVIDIA RTX Remix tool that enables modders to create ambitious remasters of classic games with NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex and advanced path-tracing that bounces light four times for improved light simulation—even casting through portals! Portal with RTX is freely downloadable from Steam for all Portal owners.
The much-anticipated ray-tracing patch for Doom Eternal has arrived, and it’s a doozy. At the top of the bill is support for ray-traced lighting effects in the FPS game using Khronos’ cross-platform Vulkan API, enabling advanced effects on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.
AImotive announced that it has integrated Vulkan Ray Tracing into its aiSim 3.0, the ISO26262 certified, automotive-grade open simulator tool for automated driving development. Vulkan Ray Tracing’s real-time rendering technology is particularly well suited to simulation environments, making it possible to utilize Vulkan capabilities for professional automotive applications alongside gaming.
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) recently introduced Vulkan Ray Tracing into their Helios real-time renderer. StageCraft and the Helios renderer are entirely new toolsets that allow for assets of final VFX level quality to be displayed on the LED walls without requiring as much manual optimization while allowing a high degree of reconfigurability “live on the day”. ILM’s Helios real-time renderer is able to handle extreme scene complexity, with millions and millions of polygons to enable assets of final VFX level quality to be displayed on the LED walls of a film studio in real time during filming.
Khronos has recently released the final versions of the ray tracing extension specifications. It is latest release, Diligent Engine enabled full support of these extensions to provide easy-to-use yet fully exhaustive cross-platform ray tracing API. The API is the same for Vulkan and Direct3D12 and allows authoring shaders in HLSL for both back-ends. GLSL and SPIRV bytecode are also supported by Vulkan back-end. The API lets developers concentrate on the algorithm essence and leave handling of the implementation-specific details to the engine.
A new tutorial demonstrates how ray tracing API in Diligent Engine can be used to simulate physics-based light transport in a scene to render soft shadows, multiple-bounce reflections and refractions, and dispersion.
Khronos announces that LunarG has released the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.2.162.0, with full support for the new Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, including Validation Layers and integration of upgraded GLSL, HLSL and SPIR-V shader tool chains. The Khronos open source Vulkan Samples and Vulkan Guide have been upgraded to illustrate ray tracing techniques. Finally, with production drivers shipping from both AMD and NVIDIA, developers are now enabled to easily integrate Vulkan Ray Tracing into their applications.
For the past two years, Holochip has been working on light field technology for the US Navy’s Aegis program. The program calls for a table top light field display that can accommodate horizontal and vertical real-time parallax. In October 2020, the team working on OpenXR™ at Holochip released an open source Vulkan® example projectand started work with light field display technology using the OpenXR API. As a result of both efforts, Holochip has discovered a method of light field real-time rendering that is built upon the Khronos Group’s Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions.
Nsight Systems is a system-wide performance analysis tool, designed to help developers tune and scale software across CPUs and GPUs. This release includes support for the Vulkan Ray Tracing Final Specification.
Today, Khronos has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the existing Vulkan framework. This is a significant milestone as it is the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration - and can be deployed either using existing GPU compute or dedicated ray tracing cores. Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, but also introduces advanced functionality such as the ability to load balance ray tracing setup operations onto the host CPU. Although ray tracing will be first deployed on desktop systems, these Vulkan extensions have been designed to enable and encourage ray tracing to also be deployed on mobile. Additionally, Khronos has posted a blog on “Vulkan Ray Tracing Best Practices for Hybrid Rendering” which explores ray tracing techniques in Wolfenstein: Youngblood.
NVIDIA is presenting the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) October 5-9, 2020 online. For those developers looking to learn more about Ray Tracing with Vulkan, there will be 2 Vulkan sessions on October 6th. This session is a highlight reel of code migration from DirectX to Vulkan ray tracing - including missteps, obstacles and insights encountered along the way. We will also cover recommendations for tooling setup and techniques to get your ray tracing journey smoothly underway. More information is available here.
The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry. An introductory launch presentation on Vulkan Ray Tracing is here, and further technical details can be found in this blog post.
Today, The Khronos Group announces the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.
