Intel Lands Vulkan Ray-Tracing Prep Work In Mesa 20.3

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Lands Vulkan Ray-Tracing Prep Work In Mesa 20.3

Following the news that we were first to report last month on Intel starting open-source public patches for Vulkan ray-tracing in preparation for their forthcoming Xe HPG graphics card, the initial prep work for that Vulkan ray-tracing support has now been merged in time for Mesa 20.3...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Prep-Work-Vulkan-RT-20.3

[ernstp]

Nvidia supports their own Vulkan extensions, however there are new official KHR extensions coming, which are what Intel and AMD will support, right?

[smitty3268]

Nvidia supports their own Vulkan extensions, however there are new official KHR extensions coming, which are what Intel and AMD will support, right?

Correct.

[ernstp]

Correct.

Nvidia are usually quite quick at adding support for new extensions, so hopefully the the transition will be quick...

Wonder if Wolfenstein: Youngblood will port to the new extensions. AMD will probably encourage them to! :-)

[aufkrawall]

Nvidia are usually quite quick at adding support for new extensions, so hopefully the the transition will be quick...

In their Vulkan developer driver. Their regular consumer driver often lags behind vs. AMD & Intel (also on Windows).
Well, but of course not in terms of raytracing.

[FireBurn]

Will older devices be able to do raytracing with compute shaders (but obviously less efficiently)?

[FireBurn]

Will older devices be able to do raytracing with compute shaders (but obviously less efficiently)?

[cbrunhaver]

https://youtu.be/-FvAJmq8NvI

This XDC talk by intel vulkan raytracing was quite illuminating.

I couldn't imagine older devices will be supported via compute shaders. So many new extensions and structures to support and even XE-lp would be unbearably slow if intel is getting 10X raytracing acceleration, as AMD is roughly claiming with their implementation.

Let's just be happy that future hardware will support this rather than trying to use these radically different features on hardware than was never designed to support it.

[Ladis]

Will older devices be able to do raytracing with compute shaders (but obviously less efficiently)?

Not on the GPU, but still can run on CPU (like we had e.g. with Vertex Shader in the far past). E.g. Doom (2016) uses RT - purely on CPU as at the time it didn't exist on any GPU. You just can't run enough of rays to get a mirror picture on shiny objects, but still enough e.g. for the global illumination. In fact, as the core performance increases with new CPU models and they have more cores (e.g. compared to the year 2016 about that Doom game), I wouldn't be surprised some less resolution version to be allowed in some games (e.g. like when llvmpipe was a new thing, they showed off how it can run Quake 3 smoothly purely on CPU).