Nvidia enables porting of DirectX Ray-Tracing to Vulkan

[Iichter]

Big "open-source" achievements aren't too common for NVIDIA or Microsoft much less together, but thanks to their open-source work on the DXC DirectXCompiler it's possible to easily convert HLSL DXR shaders to SPIR-V for Vulkan.

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NVIDIA Demonstrates Porting Of DirectX Ray-Tracing To Vulkan - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

A more detailed post from Nvidia: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/bringing-hlsl-ray-tracing-to-vulkan/

I'm quite surprized that Microsoft open-sourced their DirectXCompiler and that it lets developers to support both Vulkan and DirectX with one HLSL codebase, let alone allowing (now thanks to Nvidia) translating DXR into Vulkan (more precisely to their NVIDIA VKRay Vulkan vendor extension, but once Vulkan will support cross-vendor ray-tracing this will hugely help nonetheless).

Vulkan supports way more platforms than DirectX (Linux, consoles, Android, ...), meaning that this is good news for everyone that are happy to see more artificial barriers being torn down.

I'm adding an image from the khronos group to those like myself that were unaware that such awesome tools existed:

HLSL as a First Class Vulkan Shading Language

HLSL support in Vulkan has come a long way since its introduction. Over the past couple of years HLSL in Vulkan has made amazing strides to hit a critical maturation point and earned the coveted label of production ready. HLSL in Vulkan has been achieved through integrating a SPIR-V backend into...

www.khronos.org

 

[zerocalories]

Tag for when someone explains this in layman's terms

 

[Ghos]

 

[ErazorRain]

RTX for Vulkan API aka Raytracing for Linux basically.... In laymans terms.

EDIT: New consoles very likely uise Vulkan too, so there's also that

 

[Iichter]

Tag for when someone explains this in layman's terms

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Developers can port their Ray-Tracing implementation done through DirectX Ray-Tracing (a proprietary graphics API only supporting Windows) to Vulkan (an open-source graphics API that supports way more platforms).

 

[GhostTrick]

Jveux de la chehma sur mon ray-tracing 😎

 

[Deleted member 34714]

Not really surprised considering how much more Vulkan is used all around compared to DX12, it makes sense to have something like this to the benefit of Nvidia.

 

[Alex3190]

This is great news! Yay

 

[Gitaroo]

Isn't wolf 2 on vulkan only with rtx support?

 

[Iichter]

Jveux de la chehma sur mon ray-tracing 😎

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Ohooo

Isn't wolf 2 on vulkan only with rtx support?

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It is, because the devs specifically implemented it through the NVIDIA VKRay Vulkan vendor extension, but thanks to this addition to the DirectX Compiler, devs can now translate their initial DirectX Ray-Tracing implementation directly to that NVIDIA VKRay Vulkan extension (and in the future, to Vulkan Ray-Tracing across different GPU vendors).

 

[TronLight]

Isn't wolf 2 on vulkan only with rtx support?

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Vulkan already supports ray tracing. This just means that if a developer is using both Vulkan and DirectX for their game, they can write the code for the raytracing once and use it in both cases.

I wonder if there is a performance hit though?

 

[Dictator]

Vulkan already supports ray tracing. This just means that if a developer is using both Vulkan and DirectX for their game, they can write the code for the raytracing once and usi it in both cases.

I wonder if there is a performance hit though?

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Maybe CPU wise a tiny bit? Seems like it would be neglible if there at all based on what I just read.

 

[Deleted member 34714]

Isn't wolf 2 on vulkan only with rtx support?

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Bethesda is all in on OpenGL/Vulkan and they don't need this when their programmers can do it themselves for Vulkan but this is nice overall support for other smaller devs who can't do this.

Though as I say this, Doom Eternal won't have RTX for awhile.

 

[Iichter]

Vulkan already supports ray tracing. This just means that if a developer is using both Vulkan and DirectX for their game, they can write the code for the raytracing once and use it in both cases.

I wonder if there is a performance hit though?

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The Khronos group says that using that compiler is considered a "First-class" use-case for Vulkan, so it all depends on Nvidia's VKRay extension I would believe.

If the translation is done well at the compiler level and that Nvidia's VKRay implementation is on-par with the performances of DXR, there should be no performance hit.

 

[pksu]

This is about shaders and making it easy to write shaders in one language regardless of API being used,. It's a step done offline since unlike OpenGL, Vulkan actually has well defined intermediate shader format you can ship. There are some cases where abstraction leaks a bit though (binding model is different between DX and Vulkan) but it's a worthy goal. Engines often work around these problems by preprocessing shaders anyway, it's tooling like this that makes everything a bit easier.

Using HLSL shaders with Vulkan shouldn't cause any performance loss and will still need typical Vulkan API wrangling in the renderer.

 

[Henrar]

FYI the only console that supports Vulkan is Switch and even in that case there is a better and more supported option.

 

[ILikeFeet]

FYI the only console that supports Vulkan is Switch and even in that case there is a better and more supported option.

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All the systems support Vulkan as the minimum requirement is OpenGL 3.whatever

 

[Henrar]

All the systems support Vulkan as the minimum requirement is OpenGL 3.whatever

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Try making a renderer in Vulkan for PS4 or Xbox One, then ;)

 

[Black_Stride]

FYI the only console that supports Vulkan is Switch and even in that case there is a better and more supported option.

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You what love?