Microsoft got quite a bit of mindshare with the announcement of DirectX Raytracing (DXR) at last year’s GDC 2018. NVIDIA’s RTX technology was somewhat synonymous with DirectX 12 for a while, although NVIDIA was not exactly hiding their equivalent extension for Vulkan. It’s not that you must use DirectX 12 – it’s that you cannot use DirectX 11.
Image Credit: iOrange (via GitHub)
And now there’s a tutorial on GitHub by the user Sergii Kudlai (iOrange), complete with source code licensed under MIT. iOrange is a programmer for Digital Extremes, which is best known for their 2013 hit, Warframe, although they also collaborated with Epic Games on the earlier Unreal Tournament editions (UT2004 and earlier). They also worked on Epic Pinball.
The article is very casually worded and covers up to a single triangle.
If you’re interested in a little more depth, NVIDIA is also releasing Ray Tracing Gems for free on their website, although you need to be registered with their developer portal.
Ray Tracing Gems is available here. Currently only the first two chapters are up, but the rest will arrive every few days until approximately February 25th.
Seems like a good
Seems like a good introduction to the APIs for anyone that is interested in how it works on a more real level than “executive summary slides”.
“NVIDIA was not exactly
“NVIDIA was not exactly hiding their equivalent extension for Vulkan.”
Why would any GPU maker have to hide their support for a cross OS platform open standards Graphics API like Vulkan. It’s not like DX11/older or DX12 are available on any other OS but windows. Nvidia has new hardware IP to support and Windows is not the only OS that may be making use of Nvidia’s GPUs because there are mostly only Intel/Nvidia laptops available from the Linux OS based OEM laptop market so Nvidia has little choice but to support Vulkan.
Nvidia, AMD, Intel, and all the other CPU/APU and Mobile SOC makers are making use of Vulkan and a few other Open Standards APIs like OpenGL and OpenCL in addition to there being proprietary Graphics APIs like DX11/DX12 and Apple’s Metal that are only available on Windows/Windows 10 or MacOS.
Nvidia has its GPU’s hardware feature sets to support as does AMD and Windows/MacOS are not the only OS/Ecosystems out there. Linux is going to be even more a necessity after 2020. And I’m really hoping for some movement towards AMD’s Zen/Vega-Integrated-Graphics APUs on Linux OS based OEM laptops before the 2020-2023 time frame expires and all of the NON Windows 10 OSs from MS are EOL.
No one expects a deprecated Graphics API like DX11 to recieve support for the latest GPU hardware features when DX12 has been around for so many years. Vulkan is really the way to go for non MS and Apple ecosystem Graphics API support and Vulkan is every bit as good for getting support for the latest GPU Hardware feature sets and all the GPU/Othet companies like AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Arm Holdings/Licensees, and others make up that industry standards body the Khronos Group. Microsoft is going to have less an less to say going forward as more device users are driven away form any of MS’s OS/Software ecosystem.
Just look at windows phone and MS burning down that platform to ashes and encouraging those very windows phone clients to switch to android offerings. Will MS adopt Android and try and port DX12 over to that platform or just make use of Vulkan.
“Linux is going to be even
“Linux is going to be even more a necessity after 2020.”
So it’s 2020 that’s going to be the year of the Linux desktop… Got it. /lmao