NVIDIA Demonstrates Porting Of DirectX Ray-Tracing To Vulkan

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.

NVIDIA has written a new technical blog post on bringing HLSL ray-tracing to Vulkan with the same capabilities of DirextX Ray-Tracing. This effort is made feasible by Microsoft's existing open-source DirectXCompiler (DXC) with SPIR-V back-end for consumption by Vulkan drivers. Last year NVIDIA contributed to the open-source DXC support for SPV_NV_ray_tracing. This in turn with the open-source tooling allows converting DXR HLSL shaders into SPIR-V modules for Vulkan.

For now this DirectX Ray Tracing to Vulkan depends upon NVIDIA's NV_ray_tracing extension until the cross-vendor Vulkan ray-tracing extension(s) are finalized and published.

For those wanting to learn more about this current NVIDIA-led approach with Microsoft's open-source DXC compiler, see the NVIDIA developer blog. "The NVIDIA VKRay extension, with the DXC compiler and SPIR-V backend, provides the same level of ray tracing functionality in Vulkan through HLSL as is currently available in DXR. You can now develop ray-tracing applications using DXR or NVIDIA VKRay with minimized shader re-writing to deploy to either the DirectX or Vulkan APIs. We encourage you to take advantage of this new flexibility and expand your user base by bringing ray tracing titles to Vulkan."