The Khronos Group has released a new version of Vulkan, featuring vendor-agnostic support for Ray Tracing. As such, developers using Vulkan 1.2.162 can enable Ray Tracing effects on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware.
Vulkan 1.2.162 includes the finalized versions of VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations.
As The Khronos Group noted, the Vulkan ray-tracing specification now has the support of AMD, Arm, EA, Epic Games, Facebook, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Unity, Valve, and other stakeholders.
Do note that games already using Vulkan Ray Tracing will only work on NVIDIA’s hardware. In order for these games to work with AMD’s hardware, developers will have to implement this latest version of the Ray Tracing extensions in their games. Right now, there are only two games using NVIDIA’s Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions. These are Quake II RTX and Wolfenstein Youngblood.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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