OpenGL HW Raytracing

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
#1

Greetings,

Going over a decade of keeping my OpenGL renderer alive. I would, if possible, continue with OpenGL to implement NVidia’s Turing architecture for real-time raytracing.

Regarding to this: Turing Extensions for Vulkan and OpenGL | NVIDIA Developer, all extensions seems to be available with OpenGL 4.6.

Now, it doesn’t take long before most threads on the subject spiral into “OpenGL is Dead” argument. Whatever lane you picked, I’m still not interested to start over with Vulkan at the moment. That being say, I couldn’t find any implementation or even a proof that it is possible to implement real-time raytracing within an OpenGL renderer. What am I missing?

Thank you,

#2

What do you mean by that? Yes, all of the OpenGL extensions listed on that page are available on the given hardware. But nowhere on that page is any OpenGL extension to handle raytracing. There’s a whole section about raytracing on that page, and conspicuously absent is the text “OpenGL”.

NVIDIA has made it clear that they are not going to expose ray tracing through OpenGL, and nobody else is going to do so either. It’s just not feasible for a synchronous API like OpenGL.

#3

Thank you Alfonse, so it is true then, OpenGL is a dead end for real-time raytracing? Do you have any source on “NVIDIA has made it clear that they are not going to expose ray tracing through OpenGL”?