Real-time ray tracing could get a boost from standardized support in Vulkan

[Auer]

https://www.pcgamer.com/real-time-ray-tracing-could-get-a-boost-from-standardized-support-in-vulkan/
The Khronos Group is planning to talk about standardized ray tracing support in Vulkan at GDC next month.

"Join us to hear about the latest developments in Vulkan around standardized ray tracing functionality; the working group will provide an update on the current state of the ray tracing efforts, what this means for the graphics industry, and how you’ll be able to take advantage of this technology," Khronos Group states on its GDC 2020 itinerary.

 

[DejaWiz]

I've been waiting for more in-depth info about this since Vulkan 1.2 was released last month.

 

[cybereality]

This is awesome news! Probably means we are close to seeing AMD's hardware solution if they are ready to talk about it.

Ray-tracing is definitely the future. I spent some time looking into a custom ray-tracing solution for my game I'm working on, but it will probably be much better (and easier) when it's officially supported in Vulkan.

 

[Pottuvoi]

This is awesome news! Probably means we are close to seeing AMD's hardware solution if they are ready to talk about it.

Ray-tracing is definitely the future. I spent some time looking into a custom ray-tracing solution for my game I'm working on, but it will probably be much better (and easier) when it's officially supported in Vulkan.

With Vulkan supporting both mesh shaders and RT things could become very interesting if both AMD and Intel both will support the features.

Best of luck on tracing rays, there certainly should be quite interesting use cases.

 

[defaultluser]

And just like anything else worthwhile, the ARB Khronos is always two years behind Microsoft.

I'll be curious to see how popular this is, as most games are going to go with DXR (and Android isn't exactly going to have real-time raytacing hardware anytime soon.) We will definitely see it n the next Doom engine!

 

[cybereality]

There is already an Nvidia RTX extension for Vulkan, and there has been since October 2018:
https://devblogs.nvidia.com/vulkan-raytracing/
Khronos didn't make it an official spec because it was (and still is) proprietary to Nvidia, which is a fair decision.

Though it looks like AMD (and maybe Intel) will have ray-tracing solutions, and they probably have internal prototypes working so are ready to move forward in a cross vendor compatible way.