Vulkan 1.3.280 Released With NVIDIA Ray-Tracing Validation Extension

Vulkan 1.3.280 is out today as the newest spec update for this high performance graphics, compute, and video API.

Besides the usual spec fixes/clarifications, there is just one new extension to find with Vulkan 1.3.280: VK_NV_ray_tracing_validation.

VK_NV_ray_tracing_validation is a NVIDIA vendor extension for implementing ray-tracing validation at the driver implementation level. The extension page does little to describe the new ray-tracing validation extension, but there is a NVIDIA blog post published at the end of February that covers ray-tracing validation at the driver level. That post though is catered toward their Direct3D 12 DXR support with NVAPI for ray-tracing validation.

Ray-tracing validation at the driver level is trying to help uncover performance bottlenecks, analyze hard-to-debug issues, and root cause crashes. At least under D3D12 DXR, enabling ray-tracing validation comes with a 3~40% performance overhead cost.

Via the NVIDIA developer page are new 550.40.55 Linux and 551.81 Windows driver releases that implement the VK_NV_ray_tracing_validation extension. Enabling the ray-tracing validation behavior with the NVIDIA Vulkan driver requires setting the NV_ALLOW_RAYTRACING_VALIDATION=1 environment variable.