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.
AMDVLK 2020.Q1.3 brings new Vulkan extensions including EXT_post_depth_coverage, EXT_texel_buffer_alignment, and KHR_non_semantic_info. Vulkan 1.2.133 is the API version now exposed. Learn more on Phoronix.
The Turnip Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors can now handle transform feedback. Turnip’s VK_EXT_transform_feedback support was merged overnight for the in-development Mesa 20.1 due out next quarter. (Source: phoronix)
NVIDIA recently published Ray Tracing Gems, a deep-dive into best practices for real-time ray tracing. The book was made free-to-download, to help all developers embrace the bleeding edge of rendering technology. Ray Tracing Essentials is a seven-part video series hosted by the editor of Ray Tracing Gems, NVIDIA’s Eric Haines. The aim of this program is to make developers aware of various terms and concepts used in the field and with Vulkan, while also inspiring them with dramatic and beautiful uses of the technology. This post is about the fourth video in this series, the Ray Tracing Pipeline.
Basemark announced the ability for anyone to objectively compare devices ranging from powerful desktops to low-powered embedded systems across all major operating systems. This is all possible with a new version of Basemark GPU, available now.
Basemark GPU 1.2 features the following:
Operating system support: Android, iOS, Linux, MacOS and Windows
Graphics API support: DirectX 12, Metal 2, OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.0
Three different modes: High Quality for powerful desktop computer, Medium Quality for laptops and powerful mobile devices such as premium smartphones and Simple Quality for embedded devices and entry level smartphones
The Vulkan Guide has been updated to include information on all Vulkan 1.1 and 1.2 extensions. If you’re new to Vulkan or just looking for some extension information, this is a great place to get started with a high level explanation of the API.
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).
