Tuesday, May 8th 2018
NVIDIA Adapting RTX Ray-tracing to Vulkan API
NVIDIA made big moves to bring a semblance of real-time ray-tracing to the masses, with the new RTX technology, as part of its efforts to replace rasterized rendering, which has dominated 3D graphics for the past three decades. Microsoft has come out with its own extension to DirectX 12, with the new DXR API. NVIDIA is now reportedly working with the Khronos Group to bring RTX to Vulkan.
A new Vulkan extension titled "VK_NV_raytracing" surfaced in tech-documents accessed by Phoronix, which is the company's contribution to a multi-vendor standard for ray-tracing, being developed by the Khronos Group. This extension could expose several NVIDIA RTX features and presets to Vulkan. It also has similar code-structures to DXR, to minimize duplication of effort, or skill-building. NVIDIA will detail its adaptation of RTX to Vulkan further at GTC.
Sources:
NVIDIA, Phoronix
A new Vulkan extension titled "VK_NV_raytracing" surfaced in tech-documents accessed by Phoronix, which is the company's contribution to a multi-vendor standard for ray-tracing, being developed by the Khronos Group. This extension could expose several NVIDIA RTX features and presets to Vulkan. It also has similar code-structures to DXR, to minimize duplication of effort, or skill-building. NVIDIA will detail its adaptation of RTX to Vulkan further at GTC.
18 Comments on NVIDIA Adapting RTX Ray-tracing to Vulkan API
nVidia don't usually do anything for the good of anyone or anything but themselves.
Registry
I'd like to see them excluded from every single thing they lie about.
linky
as long as it's not vendor specific I'm happy and I couldn't care less about who created it.
Prototypes are essential to form mature and solid standards. You should rather be worried when software architects designs standards based on untested ideas. Well, such misconceptions are expected when people base their opinions on the polarized discussions in forums, generally displaying a strong negative bias towards Nvidia.
Meanwhile in the real world, every OpenGL developer knows very well that no one comes close to Nvidia's contributions to open standards.
"Thanks for destroying my competitor, dear nVidia, the shit you did to it is invaluable!
DirectX 9"
Many mistakenly claim that AMD will have an inherit advantage in Vulkan due to Mantle, but they are failing to realize that Vulkan is internaly based on SPIR-V from OpenCL. Vulkan have only got inspiration for some API syntax from Mantle, while the underlying implementation is completely different. Just because two APIs have similar syntax for a few functions doesn't make them the same, any programmer would know this. AMD were in fact the last vendor to release Vulkan drivers and get certified, quite a bit behind Nvidia and Intel. So far I've found nothing in Vulkan which favors AMD, and no one should be taken seriously claiming AMD have such advantages, until they can prove such inherit advantages exsist in the design.
I also want to remind everyone that no games so fare are using Vulkan directly, but instead uses an abstraction layer to simulate Direct3D 11 or OpenGL. It will take years before we see good game engines designed around Vulkan.