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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 25 2020, @09:04AM (2 children)
Why can't Microsoft, a member of the Linux Foundation and champion of Github, spin DirectX into open source? Why aren't they helping Linux become a platform for native games? I mean, Linux isn't a cancer anymore, right? They want interoperability, right? They're our friends, right?
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday November 25 2020, @09:31AM (1 child)
It's inherently tied into the MS driver platform, and does nothing special. If you want to use it, you still have to convert everything you do to "Windows-like" features anyway, which has the same kind of costs as just using Wine.
Much better to just talk a low-level protocol that's close to hardware and supported by everything on all platforms anyway. Almost like you'd want, say, the people who made OpenGL to come up with something like that...
Nothing's changed, DirectX is just a different way of making OpenGL that's basically locked into one manufacturer. Opening it up won't do much at all. For a start, we know exactly the way it works because every game producer on the planet targets it. And they can swap out their DX functions for Vulkan or OpenGL any time they liked. That's basically how Half-Life was born, we're just repeating the same thing 20 years later.
Vulkan exists because both DX and OpenGL got too bulky and weighed down for their core purpose, and don't reflect the underlying hardware any more. And is cross-platform. And major studio games support both.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2020, @06:19AM
nice dance, but they should still open source it.