NVIDIA becomes first to adopt Vulkan ray tracing extension in games

According to Nvidia’s official news, Nvidia’s newly released Game Ready driver officially supports Vulkan ray tracing. In addition, Nvidia has also updated the “Thor’s Hammer II” RTX version of the game Demo to support new industry standards. The company said that many companies have been committed to introducing ray tracing to Vulkan for many years, and Nvidia has taken an active leadership position in every stage of its development.

Nvidia was selected as the chairman of the Khronos Vulkan ray tracing task group, contributing supplier extension designs to Khronos to help the Vulkan working group make rapid progress, and also driving the first version of the Vulkan ray-tracing extension specification to facilitate collecting developer feedback. Nvidia is currently the first company to adopt Vulkan ray tracing extensions in games.

According to reports, Vulkan ray tracing is no longer a patent of GeForce RTX GPU. Both the RTX version of Quake II and its latest update support Vulkan ray tracing. As the first game to support the recently released, cross-platform Vulkan ray-tracing extension, the RTX version of Quake II no longer relies on vendor-specific extensions and can run on any compatible GPU.

Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform application program interface (API) for two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics and computing. It was first released by Konas at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2015.

Similar to OpenGL, Vulkan is designed for real-time 3D graphics programs (such as video games and interactive media) on all platforms and provides high performance and a more balanced CPU and GPU usage. The other main difference between Direct3D (before version 12) and OpenGL is that Vulkan is a low-level API and can perform parallel tasks. In addition, Vulkan can better distribute the use of multiple CPU cores.

(Source)