The Khronos Group announced the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions, creating the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Primarily focused on meeting desktop market demand for both real-time and offline rendering, the release of Vulkan Ray Tracing as provisional extensions enables the developer community to provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Comments and feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors. The specifications are available today on the Vulkan Registry.
Driver release updates and the status of Vulkan ecosystem components will be posted on the Vulkan Ray Tracing Provisional Release Tracker. A Vulkan SDK that includes support for Vulkan Ray Tracing will become available once all the necessary ecosystem components are upstreamed; check this link to watch for its availability. An introductory launch presentation on Vulkan Ray Tracing is here, and further technical details can be found in this blog post.