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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: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday November 26 2020, @10:38PM (1 child)
I heard about Metro Exodus. Also Valve has ported Half-Life Alyx. There is some very good development for linux.
But as for WINE/Proton, I personally do not consider that linux game development. (While technically it is a great achievement, it does not solve the problem of companies actually supporting their products)
For the record, I think proton is great for allowing people to move to linux and keeping their existing game library... But many devs use WINE as a crutch to ignore linux.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 27 2020, @02:01AM
What you said is true, but it's also the way it's gonna be as long as Linux is around 1% [phoronix.com].
WINE is increasingly well polished (that's clear to me from WINE/Proton running the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Death Stranding), and ideally game developers could put in a tiny extra effort to make sure games cooperate with WINE, maybe submitting bug reports ahead of release if necessary. I haven't heard of that happening though.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]