NVIDIA Vulkan Ray-Tracing Extensions Coming Soon, OptiX API Unveiled

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Vulkan Ray-Tracing Extensions Coming Soon, OptiX API Unveiled

Back during GDC when everyone was talking about ray-tracing and Microsoft's DirectX Ray-Tracing API for DX12, but NVIDIA has now confirmed they will be soon releasing ray-tracing extensions for Vulkan. Additionally, the company has now thoroughly gone over their new OptiX API for CUDA-based ray-tracing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-OptiX-API

[TemplarGR]

Let's hope no one uses Optix for games. Typical Nvidia with their vendor lock-in shenanigans...

[theriddick]

They probably will, however I wonder, will developers be able to use OptiX on windows with Vulkan api? or has MS paid them not to do that?

I also wonder if AMD's method capitalises on GPU's FP16, because that seems to be what NVIDIA is doing here given tensor cores are basically just extra FP16 processing units.

[shmerl]

CUDA based? No, thanks.

[TemplarGR]

They probably will, however I wonder, will developers be able to use OptiX on windows with Vulkan api? or has MS paid them not to do that?

I also wonder if AMD's method capitalises on GPU's FP16, because that seems to be what NVIDIA is doing here given tensor cores are basically just extra FP16 processing units.

OptiX is CUDA based. Obviously it won't be used on Vulkan...

[tildearrow]

Typo:

OptiX provides a programmable ray-tracing pripeline,

[GunpowaderGuy]

"data structures for fast ray-object intersection " so distance fields then ?

[GunpowaderGuy]

Has someone opened an issue on vulkan's github over this ray tracing craze ,or prepared some other channel of communication so we can discuss how to avoid vendor lock in with khronos ?

[pmoreau]

The article makes it sound like OptiX is brand new: it isn’t. OptiX 1.0 was released back in 2009, and the version described in the blog post seems to be OptiX 5, which was announced at SIGGRAPH last year and released in November 2017. Maybe OptiX 5 wasn’t yet rebased on top of RTX, but that shouldn’t have an impact on the API.

"data structures for fast ray-object intersection " so distance fields then ?

OptiX Prime uses triangles, but in OptiX you are free to use whatever primitive you want, as you are the one writing the intersection program used for each geometry node in the scene graph. A BVH variant will then be built around them.

[tuke81]

There were talks about vulkan ray tracing on GTC. Slides/video of that session should be out something about week or so.