The Khronos Group , the consortium that oversees the development of numerous industrial APIs, has released the final version of the dedicated Vulkan API extensions al ray tracing , after having published the draft last March. Developers therefore have a way from now on to develop ray traced games around the Vulkan API , by exploiting the hardware acceleration of GPUs, both with dedicated units (RT core for Nvidia or Ray Accelerator for AMD) and through shader units.

According to the consortium, “Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) within DirectX 12 “, but also introduces other features such as the ability to balance the load using the central CPU. “Although ray tracing will primarily be applied to desktop systems, these extensions have been designed to enable and encourage the spread of ray tracing on mobile devices as well “.

The consortium has received and integrated the opinions of hardware manufacturers and software developers in recent months, and in the coming weeks some components of the ecosystem will be updated, culminating in the publication of a new Vulkan SDK (version 1.2. 162. 0 or later) with ray tracing support in mid-December.

In the past few hours both AMD and Nvidia have released drivers with support for Vulkan ray tracing extensions. Intel is also working to support Vulkan Ray Tracing with future Xe architecture-based gaming GPUs.

It is good to remember that Vulkan games that support ray tracing have arrived on the market, such as Wolfenstein: Youngblood , are based on VKRay , a set of three extensions developed by Nvidia to offer ray tracing in the title despite the fact that the main Vulkan API is not yet ready. There are three titles based on VKRay and ray tracing cannot be enabled in the presence of AMD Radeon GPUs, even if according to Nvidia there are no technical impediments, only AMD’s lack of support for its extension.