This month in the NVIDIA Developer Blog, Ashwin Lele and Ashwin Kolhe discuss how to use HLSL Ray Tracing with Vulkan. The NVIDIA VKRay extension, with the DXC compiler and SPIR-V backend, provides the same level of ray tracing functionality in Vulkan through HLSL as is currently available in DXR. You can now develop ray-tracing applications using DXR or NVIDIA VKRay with minimized shader re-writing to deploy to either the DirectX or Vulkan APIs.
There are best practices for GPU performance events that are universally used by profiling tools such as NVIDIA Nsight Graphics and NVIDIA Nsight Systems, for navigating through complex frame rendering. While all modern graphics APIs (Direct3D 11, Direct3D 12, Vulkan, and OpenGL 4.3) offer a simple solution to set these begin/end performance markers, they do not enforce the conventions that profiling tools follow. Read on to learn some Do’s and Don’ts to make your game work better with profiling tools and easier for NVIDIA engineers to help you optimize your game.
With the Godot 4.0 release is still months away from seeing its stable debut with the new Vulkan renderer, the Vulkan renderer branch was today merged to mainline. More details on today’s Godot Vulkan merging milestone via the GodotEngine.org blog. (Source: phoronix).
LunarG has released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.131.1. For more detailed information, you may visit the Vulkan SDK Download site.
AMD has announced their TressFX 4.1/Unreal Engine integration and TressFX 4.1/Radeon Cauldron framework implementation. The TressFX library is AMD’s hair/fur rendering and simulation technology. TressFX is designed to use the GPU to simulate and render high quality realistic hair and fur. New in TressFX 4.1 is source code for DirectX 12 and Vulkan.
NVIDIA has added support for profiling applications that make use of Vulkan and OpenGL interoperability. Nsight Graphics 2020.1 is now available for download, and adds new support for 3 Vulkan extensions:
Intel has published a new graphics driver for its GPUs (Intel 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th Gen processors) on Windows 10. This new driver (version 26.20.100.7755) comes Vulkan 1.2 support. Complete details and download are now available from Intel. (Source: Geek3D).
Think Silicon GLOVE v0.4, library which implements OpenGL over Vulkan, been released. GLOVE currently focuses on OpenGL ES 2.0 + EGL 1.4 and is a standalone project. GLOVE 0.4 is the project’s first new release in more than one year and comes with expanded hardware and software support. GLOVE now supports Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS for running OpenGL over Vulkan. (Source: Phoronix)
AMD has released their Vulkan 1.2 driver as part of the official Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.1.2. Vulkan 1.2, released on January 15, 2020, is a large update which promoted many extensions into the core API. You can download the latest Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition here.
The Khronos Group announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020. Vulkan continues to evolve by listening to developer needs, shipping new functionality as extensions, and then consolidating extensions that receive positive developer feedback into a unified core API specification. Khronos and the Vulkan community will support Vulkan 1.2 in a wide range of open source compilers, tools, and debuggers by the end of January 2020. Driver release updates will be posted on the Vulkan Public Release Tracker.
Find more information on the Vulkan 1.2 specification and associated tests and tools at:
Vulkan Working Group member James Jones, Principal Software Engineer at NVIDIA, has written a Khronos Blog on using Vulkan Timeline Semaphores in Vulkan 1.2. The new timeline semaphore synchronization API shipping as VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore, and a core feature of Vulkan 1.2, defines a primitive containing a superset of both the original VkSemaphore and VkFence primitives, while simultaneously eliminating many of the most painful limitations of the previous APIs. Learn how this new feature in Vulkan 1.2 works with code examples.
Diligent Engine is a modern cross-platform abstraction layer for Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Direct3D11 and Direct3D12. In release v2.4.b, Diligent Engine enabled MSAA and bindless resources, implemented GPU queries, added new tutorials as well as made major improvements to code quality assurance by enabling automated unit tests, format validation and static code analysis.
GPUOpen has announced the release of Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) v1.7. This release adds support for the latest Radeon graphics cards: the RX 5500 series and the RX 5300 series. RGP generates easy to understand visualizations of how your DirectX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL applications interact with the GPU at the hardware level. Profiling a game is both a quick and simple process using the Radeon Developer Panel and our public GPU driver.
LunarG released new Windows, Linux, and macOS SDKs for Vulkan 1.1.130 that include the most recent extensions and maintenance updates.