NVIDIA Stabilizes Its Vulkan/OpenGL Ray-Tracing Extension

It was just in mid-September that NVIDIA introduced its ray-tracing extension for Vulkan as VK_NVX_raytracing with it debuting as an "experimental" feature along with OpenGL/GLSL functionality. Already they seem happy with the design that it's being promoted to stable.

While adding a few last-minute capabilities, the NVX extension is promoted and now firmed up as NV_raytracing. It's still a vendor-specific extension until there is a firm consensus by working group members to promote it as an official extension, but in dropping "NVX" it's considered by NVIDIA to be stable.

This includes SPV_NV_ray_tracing, VK_NV_ray_tracing, and GL_NV_ray_tracing. I am actually surprised they so quickly settled on the stable extension considering it's been less than two months and not all game developers have had time to evaluate it or even get their hands on new NVIDIA RTX hardware.

Presumably NVIDIA will be pushing out new Windows/Linux graphics driver releases soon that feature this stabilized ray-tracing support.