Khronos Group recently announced the official launch of Vulkan’s ray-tracing extensions. The platforms ray-tracing features will largely deliver parity with Microsoft’s existing DXR 1.1 standard, with the exception of some nifty performance options.

Reviews , News , CPU , GPU , Articles , Columns , Other "or" search relation. 5G , Accessory , AMD , Android , Apple , ARM , Audio , Bay Trail , Business , Cannon Lake , Charts , Chinese Tech , Chromebook , Coffee Lake , Comet Lake , Console , Convertible / 2-in-1 , Cryptocurrency , Cyberlaw , Deal , Desktop , Fail , Foldable , Gadget , Galaxy Note , Galaxy S , Gamecheck , Gaming , Geforce , Google Nexus / Pixel , How To , Ice Lake , Internet of Things (IoT) , iOS , iPad Pro , iPhone , Kaby Lake , Lakefield , Laptop , Launch , Linux / Unix , MacBook , Mini PC , Monitor , MSI , OnePlus , Opinion , Phablet , Project Athena , Renoir , Review Snippet , Rocket Lake , Rumor , Ryzen (Zen) , Security , Smart Home , Smartphone , Smartwatch , Software , Storage , Tablet , ThinkPad , Thunderbolt , Tiger Lake , Touchscreen , Ultrabook , Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR) , Wearable , Whiskey Lake , Windows , Workstation , XPS , Zen 3 (Vermeer) Ticker

Khronos Group, the overseers of the Vulkan graphics API standard, recently announced the public release of ray tracing extensions for Vulkan. This is a major step towards the wider adoption of ray-tracing in games: previously, Microsoft had announced the DXR extension to its proprietary DirectX API for ray-tracing support.

Vulkan ray-tracing, however, is the first open-source API solution. More than anything else, this shows that ray-tracing isn’t a proprietary fad like HairWorks or PhysX, and that the community’s been working on a solution since at least 2018. Strictly speaking, vendor-specific ray-tracing implementations have existed on Vulkan for quite some time:the RTX-enabled Vulkan title Wolfenstein: Youngblood used Nvidia’s vendor-specific extensions.

Vulkan’s new ray-tracing support doesn’t offer anything radically new, apart from feature parity with the DXR 1.1 standard. However, Khronos’ announcement hints at potential performance benefits from running ray-tracing workloads over Vulkan. This in terms of the “Build Acceleration Structure on Host” feature, which essentially pushes some of the ray-tracing workload back to idle CPU cores.

In games that don’t fully saturate 12 or 16 threads, this could be a great way of extracting additional performance. With the Xbox Series X’s ray-tracing capabilities confirmed and now the Vulkan announcement, we might finally start games deploy ray-tracing features without being limited to Nvidia’s RTX series.