NVIDIA's Work On Adding Ray-Tracing To Vulkan

2018 appears to be the year of ray-tracing with the major hardware vendors, game engines, and others all working on modern ray-tracing efforts with the GPUs becoming powerful enough to handle this alternative to rasterized rendering, etc. While Microsoft has out the DirectX Raytracing API for D3D12, NVIDIA has been working on extending Vulkan to also suit ray-tracing use-cases.

NVIDIA has been working on exposing their RTX ray-tracing tech through Vulkan via a VK_NV_raytracing extension that fits with the Vulkan API well. NVIDIA has offered this ray-tracing API design to The Khronos Group as they work towards a multi-vendor standardization for ray-tracing with Vulkan.

If you are interested in their approach to ray-tracing with Vulkan, a presentation from this year's GPU Technology Conference is now available. The NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference took place at the end of March while now it seems the presentation material are finally available.

For those interested in learning about Vulkan ray-tracing, there is the PDF slide deck as well as this video recording of the session.