The Khronos Group has ratified and released the Vulkan® Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the computer graphics industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration.
Vulkan Ray Tracing
Vulkan’s technology focused on ray tracing is primarily focused on desktop demand for both real-time and offline rendering. So this means both professional applications and games, recognizing that many 3D applications today are increasingly utilizing game engines from Epic and Unity at their core.
The provisional ray tracing extensions enable the developer community to test this technology out and provide feedback before final specifications. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.
Ray Tracing Architecture in Vulkan, the Khronos Group’s cross-platform, multi-device graphics API.
The Vulkan Ray Tracing Task Sub Group (TSG) wrote a blog that details the Ray Tracing provisional extensions. In the blog, the Vulkan Ray Tracing TSG gives an overview of each extension and provides links to more resources.
DevEd for Vulkan Developers
Apparently developers wish for a single resource for Vulkan education. Khronos Group has now started delivering such a new source. There are new Vulkan Code Samples and you can find the latest new resources here.
The Vulkan Guide is designed to help developers get up and going with the world of Vulkan. It is aimed to be a light read that leads to many other useful links depending on what a developer is looking for, and now the guide has been updated to include 1.1 and 1.2 extensions.