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Vulkan 1.2.162 Released With Ray-Tracing Support Promoted
Earlier this year Vulkan ray-tracing arrived in provisional form while with today's Vulkan 1.2.162 specification update this functionality has been promoted to stable and ready for broad industry support.
The Vulkan ray-tracing support is now deemed final and out of the provisional guard. This includes the finalized versions of VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations.
The Vulkan ray-tracing specification now has the support of AMD, Arm, EA, Epic Games, Facebook, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Unity, Valve, and other stakeholders.
It's official: Vulkan now offers an alternative to DirectX Raytracing
Today marks the moment the Vulkan API is officially ready for ray tracing. The Khronos Group behind the open API has announced the final Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, and that means there's finally a firm alternative to Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing API used extensively in ray-traced games today.
Integrated right into the existing Vulkan framework, the new Vulkan Ray Tracing is a set of extensions—Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL—that allow developers to adopt ray tracing in games utilising the Vulkan API.
Vulkan is a hot ticket item amongst game developers due to its generally solid performance with fewer legacy or convoluted systems to weigh it down, but it's also popular simply for the fact it's not tied intrinsically to any single hardware or platform provider—unlike, say, its main competitor in the gaming API space, DirectX 12.
See also: NVIDIA Releases Beta Driver With Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Support
Valve Now Funding Blumenkrantz - Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan To Continue
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday November 24 2020, @07:00PM (6 children)
As an Nvidia guy, I'm perfectly aware that ray tracing is a huge deal on the latest hardware. But, looking at the downloads page for drivers, I found this:
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday November 24 2020, @09:52PM (5 children)
no disrespect intended but .. WTF?
Other than knowing I have a nVidia card in my desktop I know next to zero about the different graphics cards that are in use.
what exactly are you trying to say with that driver support list and how does it relate to the article?
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday November 24 2020, @10:20PM (4 children)
Well, it means only one thing: An ancient GTX730 can do some limited ray tracing. Which may (or may not) enable someone to play "modern" games on very low settings.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday November 24 2020, @10:45PM
Thank you for the clarification.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday November 24 2020, @10:57PM (1 child)
Non-RTX/RDNA2 cards have been able to do raytracing (outside of a handful of games using Nvidia's proprietary thing only). How well depends on factors including the implementation.
The latest games are still based on rasterization, with some amount of ray tracing features thrown in on top. That could change to a purely ray tracing approach in the future, which would be great for game developers since it can look good and natural with less work. But that is 3-5+ years from now.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2020, @01:14AM
Yeah, we're post the peak-bitcoin-mining-on-desktop, we need to spur the consumption of expensive hardware. Besides, the home consumer needs heating during winter (and extra A/C in summer).
(grin)
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday November 25 2020, @09:26AM
Ah, the old "it's all about the games" thing.
The raytracing APIs may well be useful for far more than gaming, and if they are a simple layer of already-existing work that can work on older hardware (just slowly), then why not expose them in the driver?
Remember how back-in-the-day we abused GPUs to do things that weren't graphics-related? They formalised that and turned it into CUDA, OpenCL and similar!
And there's nothing stopping indie games, say, selectively employing a small feature of ray-tracing in a game that only needs limited power but can benefit or requires RT functions... better to be able to run it than it just crash out with a driver error.
Forget the game thing. Think "this is a new capability in the driver that we're able to expose and use for no effort at all, even on limited hardware". That's pretty much how standards are made.