NVIDIA's Work On Adding Ray-Tracing To Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA's Work On Adding Ray-Tracing To Vulkan

2018 appears to be the year of ray-tracing with the major hardware vendors, game engines, and others all working on modern ray-tracing efforts with the GPUs becoming powerful enough to handle this alternative to rasterized rendering, etc. While Microsoft has out the DirectX Raytracing API for D3D12, NVIDIA has been working on extending Vulkan to also suit ray-tracing use-cases...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-Ray-Tracing-NVIDIA

[Meteorhead]

This work is interesting, especially alongside the open-source Radeon ProRender also built atop Vulkan. An open-source implementation of a ray-tracing API as well as sensible hooks into the API when implemented using vendor extensions makes a powerful duo.

[GunpowaderGuy]

This renwed interest in Ray tracing comes too late , neural networks can already be used for ilumination , and soon enough will be capable of reliably hallucinating high quality video in real time

[eydee]

2018 appears to be the year of ray-tracing

We're almost halfway into the year, and absolutely nothing happened except for some talking. Even if some mind blowing ray tracing stuff gets released today, it still needs time to actually get to people, and it still requires most people to purchase hardware that is impossible to purchase. 2018 is definitely not the year of ray-tracing. Maybe the year of talking about ray-tracing.

[TemplarGR]

Yeah Nvidia the saviour of opensource.... Too bad AMD has already provided an opensource solution....

[VikingGe]

Too bad AMD has already provided an opensource solution....

One that is based on OpenCL and therefore not usable for games. Or did I miss something here?

I think Nvidia just want to wire up their RTX stuff which they are already using as a DXR backend to Vulkan. Nothing wrong with that, although I have my doubts that anybody is actually going to use it any time soon.

[LinAGKar]

One that is based on OpenCL and therefore not usable for games. Or did I miss something here?

What exactly makes games unable to use OpenCL?

[VikingGe]

What exactly makes games unable to use OpenCL?

1. There's no Vulkan<->OpenCL interop.
2. Drivers (especially on AMD) are all over the place.
3. I think OpenGL<->OpenCL interop is pretty inefficient.

[PackRat]

Yeah Nvidia the saviour of opensource.... Too bad AMD has already provided an opensource solution....

PowerVr has an open source solution for ray-tracing with vulkan there is a demo of it running on Ubuntu with Unreal engine 4 . Looks like the little guy beat both Nvidia and Amd the tech demo on youtube is from may 2017.

Too bad they don't make desktop gpu's with the crazy market price the competition would be good. PowerVr was in the Sega dreamcast console.

[numacross]

Too bad they don't make desktop gpu's with the crazy market price the competition would be good. PowerVr was in the Sega dreamcast console.

They also did cards for PCs with KYRO and KYRO II, but ultimately failed to keep up. Good times