Vulkan 1.2.162: will bring support for Ray Tracing

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El Ray Tracing it has become almost a monothem in the world of graphics. And it is not for less, this technique allows to greatly improve the visual appearance of video games. And current graphics cards, both from AMD and NVIDIA, support it to delight many gamers with modern equipment. For now, DirectX was "lucky" to support it, but ... what about Vulkan?

Well, the powerful open source graphical API will also have Ray Tracing support. It will come along with the launch of the Vulkan version 1.2.162. So, all gaming lovers can count on these improvements in video games that are not designed to work with the Microsoft API.

This was officially announced The Khoronos Group. The new Ray Tracing extensions for Vulkan arrive, with them the acceleration of cross-platform ray tracing. Along with this release will come new extensions such as:

  • VK_KHR_acceleration_structure
  • VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline
  • VK_KHR_ray_query
  • VK_KHR_pipeline_library
  • VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations

A huge step forward for the Vulkan graphics API that gets into video games with state-of-the-art graphics capable of supporting Ray Tracing. Therefore, Linux, macOS and Windows systems will be able to enjoy this technology, as well as on AMD, NVIDIA and Intel chips that have hardware support for it.

En LinuxUntil now, Ray Tracing could be used using NVIDIA's own extensions, but only for its own graphics cards. Therefore, it was quite limited for many users.

If you are interested learn more, NVIDIA has released Vulkan Beta Driver 455.46.02 to support these extensions, along with its Nsight Graphics tool in its version 2020.6. Intel will not have hardware support until 2021, with the arrival of its dedicated Xe-HPG GPUs. And AMD already has a driver ready for Windows, but they have yet to make it into their Radeon software for Linux soon.


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