Vulkan Ray-Tracing's VK_KHR_ray_query Lands For Intel's Open-Source Linux Driver

Ahead of upcoming Intel Arc graphics cards shipping with ray-tracing capabilities, Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has landed its VK_KHR_ray_query support.

For months Intel has been preparing the necessary driver infrastructure for handling Vulkan ray-tracing on Linux. Back in Decemer they merged SPIR-V and NIR ray queries bits, preparations for VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, and then landing this morning is actually exposing VK_KHR_ray_query capabilities.

VK_KHR_ray_query allows for ray queries support for all shader types. This support is dependent upon upcoming Intel Arc discrete graphics processors with the necessary hardware support. There are other related ray-tracing extensions still to be supported.

More details via this MR that merged today to Mesa 22.1 after being in development the past three months. Mesa 22.1 will be the Q2 stable update for this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan Linux drivers.