vRt Aims To Be A Unified Vulkan Ray-Tracing Library

Written by Michael Larabel in Vulkan on 10 October 2018 at 05:11 AM EDT. 12 Comments
VULKAN
Even if you don't have a new NVIDIA RTX graphics card, the open-source vRt project aims to offer Vulkan-based ray-tracing for modern graphics cards.

vRt is a newer project (well, already with nearly 900 commits) that offers a unified ray-tracing, cross-platform library built against Vulkan 1.1. The vRt project aims for high performance at 100Mrays/r on RX Vega 64 class hardware, makes use of Vulkan compute, and is working on both Windows and Linux so far.

While the recent Vulkan 1.1.85 spec update brought the experimental VK_NVX_raytracing extension for RTX ray-tracing with NVIDIA Turing graphics cards, the vRt library currently doesn't make use of it and this library so far has been developed without RTX/Turing hardware.

The vRt project is hoping to begin enabling RTX acceleration next month and that around the end of the year is when this ray-tracing library will hopefully reach an alpha state and provide advanced ray-tracing capabilities. Sometime after that point is when the developer hopes to work on adapting vRt to games/engines and other applications.

Those wishing to learn more about this ambitious project can do so via vRt on GitHub. This is also the first Vulkan ray-tracing open-source project I am aware of and the first with Linux support -- I'm certainly anxious to get some sort of RTX benchmarks running on Linux.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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