Home / Tech News / Featured Announcement / Khronos announces final specification for Vulkan Ray Tracing extension

Khronos announces final specification for Vulkan Ray Tracing extension

For the last couple of years now, developers looking to include ray-tracing in their games have had to use DirectX 12 or rely on a custom, unofficial extension for Vulkan. That will change soon though, as Khronos has now released the final specifications for its official ray tracing extension for Vulkan, creating the “industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard” for ray tracing.

Although similar to DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, Vulkan Ray Tracing adds some new features including the ability to load balance ray tracing setup operations to the processor. Ray tracing may have been designed initially for desktops, but Khronos Group is also promoting the use of it on mobile devices.

The Vulkan, GLSL and SPIR-V extensions were initially implemented in March 2020 and have been continuously updated based on feedback from developers and hardware vendors.

The final specifications release is just the tipping point. In the coming weeks, Khronos will be updating the ecosystem components, starting with support for ray tracing shader toolchains and validation layers. This will then pave the way for the release of the Vulkan SDK with Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing support by mid-December. You can track the progress of these new updates through Github.

Developer beta drivers with the final Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions for NVIDIA GPUs and AMD GPUs can be found HERE and HERE, respectively. You can learn more about the Vulkan Ray Tracing final specifications HERE.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru says: It is great to see another cross-platform, hardware agnostic tool for more developers to bring ray tracing to their games. 

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s system requirements have been published

Sandfall Interactive has unveiled the official PC system requirements for its upcoming turn-based RPG, Clair …

We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker.

Thank you for visiting KitGuru. Our news and reviews teams work hard to bring you the latest stories and finest, in-depth analysis.

We want to be as informative as possible – and to help our readers make the best buying decisions. The mechanism we use to run our business and pay some of the best journalists in the world, is advertising.

If you want to support KitGuru, then please add www.kitguru.net to your ad blocking whitelist or disable your adblocking software. It really makes a difference and allows us to continue creating the kind of content you really want to read.

It is important you know that we don’t run pop ups, pop unders, audio ads, code tracking ads or anything else that would interfere with the KitGuru experience. Adblockers can actually block some of our free content, such as galleries!