NVIDIA Stabilizes Its Vulkan/OpenGL Ray-Tracing Extension

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Stabilizes Its Vulkan/OpenGL Ray-Tracing Extension

It was just in mid-September that NVIDIA introduced its ray-tracing extension for Vulkan as VK_NVX_raytacing with it debuting as an "experimental" feature along with OpenGL/GLSL functionality. Already they seem happy with the design that it's being promoted to stable...

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

[AdamOne]

sweeeet. too bad raytracing demos make my desktop perform like a Macintosh in 1992

[GruenSein]

*Grabbing my tinfoil hat*

Or did they just want to get it out the door ASAP to establish a solution as non-official but widespread standard, which maps very well to their hardware without much discussion about supporting other vendors' devices well?

[kaprikawn]

Raytracing is a bet on the future. In the here and now, not many people are going to pay exorbitant prices to see flamethrower reflections in a car door. I'm more excited about Vulkan, it's finally starting to see some traction, Feral have done a great job particularly.

These standards take years to go mainstream, which is why Vulkan is more exciting right now. Look at how long it took for Android games to go beyond OpenGL ES 2, or how long it took for DX9 to be overtaken by DX11. Developers target the hardware that people have in their devices, most people don't have anything that can do raytracing, plenty of people have hardware that can do Vulkan.

[droste]

*Grabbing my tinfoil hat*

Or did they just want to get it out the door ASAP to establish a solution as non-official but widespread standard, which maps very well to their hardware without much discussion about supporting other vendors' devices well?

No tinfoil hat needed here. I'm pretty sure that is the case. But since there are no other vendors' devices they can pretty much do this without anyone fighting them

[tildearrow]

Typo:

It was just in mid-September that NVIDIA introduced its ray-tracing extension for Vulkan as VK_NVX_raytacing

[jntesteves]

This could realisticaly mean that users of the extension are already finishing work on their first use cases, although it might be only demos and experimental stuff for now. They start working with select users months in advance to general availability. We might see something running on Linux soon.

[GruenSein]

No tinfoil hat needed here. I'm pretty sure that is the case. But since there are no other vendors' devices they can pretty much do this without anyone fighting them

Technically, almost any recent GPU can support ray tracing. There are many RT renderers using OpenCL etc. which gain massively over a CPU-only implementation. The difference with Nvidia's recent RTX cards is that they have dedicated fixed function hardware for this allowing for even better performance. Still, just like the DXR fallback works on all DX12 capable GPUs the ray tracing extension in Vulkan can probably be made to work on any Vulkan capable GPU. The problem with this move is that you can bet that the extension was designed for Nvidia's fixed function units and nothing else. Now, AMD and others will have to design hardware that works well with the extension instead of the other way around.

[AdamOne]

*Grabbing my tinfoil hat*

Or did they just want to get it out the door ASAP to establish a solution as non-official but widespread standard, which maps very well to their hardware without much discussion about supporting other vendors' devices well?

Hate joykills.

[cj.wijtmans]

they just wanna sell RTXs for 1000$.