Khronos Group Releases Vulkan Ray Tracing: An Open, Cross-Vendor, Cross-Platform Standard

[Tsing]

Image: Khronos Group



Ray tracing is getting a shot in the arm courtesy of the Khronos Group, which has released its provisional extensions for Vulkan Ray Tracing – an open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. This is great news for developers, as the option of a single API should make porting to various platforms (e.g., Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X) far easier.



The extensions are actually based on NVIDIA’s own Vulkan releases, but they’re largely synonymous, aside from certain prefix changes. They also square up well with Microsoft’s DirectX 12 ray-tracing implementation, with optional support for moving graphics tasks over to the CPU.



Beaverton, OR – March 17, 2020 – 6:00 AM PT – Today, The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading...

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