Vulkan API Is Officially Ray Tracing Ready With SDK, Tools, And Drivers Dec 15, 2020 09:00 EST
The Khronos Group has officially detailed that its Vulkan SDK, Tools, and Drivers are now Ray Tracing Ready. But didn t Vulkan already have Ray Tracing in it? I mean, Quake II RTX was running on Vulkan? Yes, that s true but it was running on an NVIDIA made extension in order for the game to have full support. The same thing goes for Wolfenstein: Youngblood, NVIDIA made an extension to support ray tracing in that title as well.
But, now, The Vulkan API has an official hardware-agnostic branch for ray tracing support. Khronos released the final extension in November 2020 so that developers could start integrating functionality alongside Vulkan s legacy rasterization framework. By doing so they ve allowed for Vulkan Ray Tracing to truly be the industry s first open, cross-platform, and cross-vendor solution for ray tracing acceleration.