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.
AMD has announced after a brief spell in their beta driver, support for the following new Vulkan ray tracing extensions are now available in their main Radeon Adrenalin driver 20.11.3 and onwards: VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations, and VK_KHR_pipeline_library. In addition to the ray tracing extensions, there’s also now support for VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation.
This presentation walks through a real-world example of taking an application from DirectX 12 to Vulkan ray tracing - including missteps, obstacles and insights encountered along the way. It also covers recommendations for tooling setup and techniques to get your ray tracing journey smoothly underway.
Raspberry Pi has announced that their V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for Raspberry Pi 4 has demonstrated Vulkan 1.0 conformance. The conformance process is a way to ensure that Khronos standards are consistently implemented by multiple vendors, so as to create a reliable platform for application developers.
Today, Nsight Graphics ships with support for the final version of the Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions; VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, VK_KHR_ray_query and VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline. This includes some additional GLSL and SPIR-V extensions.
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.
For the release of the first add-on for Doom Eternal, we received the offer to talk to id Software’s lead engine programmer Billy Khan about the technology of the game and id tech in general. In the extensive interview, Billy unpacks details about the Vulkan API used, storage management, LoD and streaming systems and many other interesting aspects. This interview is originally in German, we are supplying a Google translate version in English.
The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer. Learn more here.
WCCFTech has an interview with Brian Burke, NVIDIA PR Gaming Technology, Esports & Consumer VR. Brian stated that at NVIDIA, we “supports the use of industry standard APIs, such as DXR and the upcoming Vulkan Ray Tracing extension. Ahead of the release of the official Vulkan Ray Tracing extension, NVIDIA has enabled Vulkan developers to implement ray tracing via an NVIDIA extension.” Read the rest of the interview.
The Vulkan Working Group has just released the VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension, which provides a new, flexible technique to control the fragment shading rate, enabling developers to perform shading at a lower resolution than the render targets. This fine level of control allows developers to focus shading resources where they are needed, which ultimately increases rendering performance and quality.
NRD is an open sourced, spatio-temporal ray tracing de-noising library that’s designed to provide high-quality real time imagery with as few as 0.5 or 1 rays per pixel. NRD uses input signals together with environmental conditions to deliver results comparable to ground truth images. NRD supports diffuse lighting, specular lighting or reflections, and infinite light source shadows. The NRD library is fast, robust, and easy to integrate with Vulkan applications using ray tracing.
Intel merged a change to benefit Intel’s Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers for making use of the HDC data cache for uniform buffer object (UBO) pulls on Gen12+ hardware, namely Tiger Lake at this point. By making use of the data cache for UBO pulls, there is generally up to another few percent improvements for various OpenGL and Vulkan games running on Linux—either natively or through the likes of the DXVK layer. Some improvements cited in the merge include:
In December of 2019, LunarG conducted a Vulkan ecosystem survey. Many Vulkan developers shared their requests for improvements. LunarG took those suggestions to heart and created projects to address many of the developer suggestions from the survey. To learn more about the results of these projects, check out the LunarG report that itemizes key requests from the survey and reports on the status of those requests.
The V3DV Vulkan driver developed over the past year for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware with an emphasis on the Raspberry Pi 4 support is now mainlined in Mesa 20.3!
Andreas Süßenbach, a senior software developer at NVIDIA, has posted a new developer tutorial on compile-time errors vs runtime errors with Vulkan-hpp. If you are using Vulkan, there are a few ways to create runtime errors. Even with the great validation layers available with Vulkan, you must run that part of the code to detect such errors. When you use Vulkan-hpp, a header-only C++ binding for the Vulkan API, some of those runtime errors are turned into compile-time errors. Read this tutorial to learn more.