Today, Khronos has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate raytracing into the existing Vulkan framework. This is a significant milestone as it is the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for raytracing acceleration - and can be deployed either using existing GPU compute or dedicated raytracing cores. Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, but also introduces advanced functionality such as the ability to load balance raytracing setup operations onto the host CPU. Although raytracing will be first deployed on desktop systems, these Vulkan extensions have been designed to enable and encourage raytracing to also be deployed on mobile.

These extensions were initially released as provisional versions in March 2020. Since that time, we have received and incorporated feedback from hardware vendors and software developers, both inside Khronos and from the wider industry, but the overall shape of the API and the functionality provided are fundamentally unchanged. Thank you to all who reviewed and used the provisional extensions and especially those who provided feedback.Today's release of the extension specifications is just the start of the rollout of Vulkan Ray Tracing. Over the coming days and weeks, additional ecosystem components such as shader toolchains and validation layers will be updated with support for raytracing functionality to ensure developers can easily use these extensions in their applications. Progress on these ecosystem updates can be tracked in GitHub. This will culminate with the release of the Vulkan SDK (1.2.162.0 or later) with Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing support in mid-December.

The overall functionality provided by the set of Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions is unchanged since their provisional versions. The final set of extensions released today is:
Vulkan extension specifications

• VK_KHR_acceleration_structure
• VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline
• VK_KHR_ray_query
• VK_KHR_pipeline_library
• VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations

SPIR-V extensions specifications

• SPV_KHR_ray_tracing
• SPV_KHR_ray_query

GLSL extensions specifications

• GLSL_EXT_ray_tracing
• GLSL_EXT_ray_query
• GLSL_EXT_ray_flags_primitive_culling

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