Intel Talks More About Their Open-Source Vulkan Ray-Tracing Bring-Up

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 16 September 2021 at 01:42 PM EDT. 1 Comment
INTEL
Prominent Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver developer Jason Ekstrand presented at today's X.Org Developers Conference (XDC2021) about their work on enabling Vulkan ray-tracing support.

As has been covered many times already, with forthcoming Xe-HPG graphics card will feature hardware ray-tracing capabilities. While Windows users are getting excited over DirectX 12 DXR prospects with Intel graphics, on the Linux side that is obviously focused on the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions.

Over the past year now we've seen Intel preparing their Vulkan Linux driver and beginning to land pieces of their open-source Vulkan ray-tracing support puzzle. That work remains ongoing but at least it's been happening now in advance of the hardware launch and hopefully around the time the Alchemist graphics card is shipping the support will be in good standing upstream.

Jason Ekstrand presented at XDC2021 about their low-level bits around ray-tracing support, including their use of Intel's Embree ray-tracing code. The talk does also cover areas where they could potentially share more code with Intel's Windows driver, possible code sharing with the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV", and other interesting technical aspects of this big feature work going on for the Intel open-source driver.

Jason's presentation is embedded below and there is also the PDF slide deck.

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