Full press release: https://www.khronos.org/news/press/vulkan-sdk-tools-and-drivers-are-ray-tracing-ready
From Nvidia: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-vulkan-ray-tracing-game-ready-driver/
Quake II RTX with Vulkan Ray Tracing Game Ready Driver Released
Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces that LunarG has released the Vulkan Software Development Kit (SDK) version 1.2.162.0, with full support for the new Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, including Validation Layers and integration of upgraded GLSL, HLSL and SPIR-V shader tool chains. The Khronos open source Vulkan Samples and Vulkan Guide have been upgraded to illustrate ray tracing techniques. Finally, with production drivers shipping from both AMD and NVIDIA, developers are now enabled to easily integrate Vulkan Ray Tracing into their applications.
Khronos released final Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions in November 2020 to seamlessly integrate ray tracing functionality alongside Vulkan's rasterization framework, making Vulkan the industry's first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration. Vulkan Ray Tracing can be deployed using existing GPU compute or dedicated Ray Tracing cores. The Vulkan SDK now integrates all the components necessary for developers to easily use the new ray tracing extensions, such as new shader tool chains, without needing them to be built from multiple repositories, and supports ray tracing validation within the SDK validation layers.
"Shipping API specifications was just the first step in building the developer ecosystem for Vulkan Ray Tracing, we now have tools and samples to truly enable developers to tap into the power of cross-platform ray tracing acceleration," said Daniel Koch, senior graphics system software engineer at NVIDIA and Vulkan Ray Tracing TSG chair at Khronos. "One of the key requests from the developer community was the ability to easily bring DirectX 12 ray tracing (DXR) code to Vulkan. We have achieved that through delivering a carefully designed superset of DXR, and integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing support in the DXC open source HLSL compiler.
Production Vulkan drivers that include the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions are now shipping for both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, starting with the AMD Radeon Adrenalin 20.11.3 and NVIDIA R460 drivers for both GeForce and Quadro on Windows and Linux. The Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions will also be supported by Intel Xe-HPG GPUs, available in 2021, with driver support provided via regular driver updates.
From Nvidia: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-vulkan-ray-tracing-game-ready-driver/
Quake II RTX with Vulkan Ray Tracing Game Ready Driver Released
Quake II RTX has just been updated to v1.4.0, introducing new improvements and support for platform-agnostic Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions.
Quake II RTX was initially released in June 2019, reimagining the classic game's graphics with amazing ray-traced lighting, shadows, and reflections. With the 2019 release coming well ahead of cross-vendor Vulkan APIs for ray tracing, Quake II RTX implemented ray tracing using NVIDIA's 'VKRay' extensions.
This past month, the Khronos standards body formally released new cross-vendor KHR ray tracing extensions for Vulkan. So with this exciting development, NVIDIA is releasing a new Quake II RTX game update and Game Ready Driver to take advantage of the new Vulkan extensions. Now, any GPU with support for Vulkan Ray Tracing can experience Quake II RTX in all its path-traced glory.
For GeForce RTX gamers, simply update to our newest Game Ready Driver from the Drivers tab of GeForce Experience, and update to the latest version of Quake II RTX, either on Steam, our website, or GitHub.
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