The Khronos Group, an open consortium of companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the ratification and public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions. Per the group, this is the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration.

Ray tracing is a way of rendering that shows how light rays intersect and interact with geometry, materials, and light sources to create photorealistic imagery.

Vulkan Ray Tracing consists of a number of Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL extensions. However, some extensions are optional. VK_KHR, which is the primary extension, supports acceleration structure building, management, ray tracing shader stages, pipelines, and ray query intrinsics.

The VK_KHR pipeline library provides shaders that can be linked into ray tracing pipelines. Additionally, VK_KHR deferred host operations enables driver operations, including ray tracing pipeline compilation, or CPU-based acceleration structure construction, to be offloaded to application-managed CPU thread pools.

For more information, visit https://www.khronos.org/