After a six-month test phase, the Khronos Group consortium has published a first final ray tracing implementation for the Vulkan graphics API. Corresponding graphics effects run on both GeForce and Radeon graphics cards and use the ray tracing cores of modern GPUs (RTX 2000 / 3000, RX 6000). On older models the whole thing works via compute shaders, but in principle with significantly lower frame rates.

Vulkan version 1.2. 162 contains seven raytracing extensions, including VK_KHR_acceleration_structure , VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline and VK_KHR_ray_query . The current Software Development Kit (SDK) provides developers with tools for integrating and testing ray tracing graphics effects in 3D games.

AMD and Nvidia provide suitable drivers: Vulkan ray tracing works with AMD graphics cards from the Radeon software adrenalin 20. 11. 3 and with Nvidia GPUs from the GeForce 460. 89 respectively the Linux version 460. 27. 04. AMD’s Linux driver has not yet received a corresponding update.

Simple DirectX – 12 – Porting With the help of the open source HLSL compiler DXC, the porting of Microsoft’s Windows API DirectX 12 with integrated DirectX Raytracing (DXR) to Vulkan turn out to be very simple. In addition, porting layers such as Proton can display DXR graphic effects with Vulkan.

Nvidia has on 15. December 2020 released the patch 1.4.0 for “Quake 2 RTX”, which the Raytracing implementation from Vulkan’s own extension VK_NV_ray_tracing updated to Khronos’ final version. As a result, the first-person shooter now also runs on AMD graphics cards, but so far not particularly fast: A GeForce RTX 3090 achieves about twice as high frame rates as a Radeon RX 6900. Mind you, “Quake 2 RTX” has not yet been optimized for AMD’s hardware ray tracing; rather, Nvidia may have tailored the game to its own architectures.

Quake 2 RTX (vanilla presets) AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT MSI GeForce RTX 3000 Gaming X Trio 515 p 269, 7 fps 515, 9 fps 1440 p 89, 2 fps 176, 5 fps 2160 p 52, 8 fps 106, 6 fps measured under Windows 10 (20 H2), Ryzen 9 5900 X, 32 GByte DDR4 – 3600 – RAM (mma)