Vulkan is getting tools and drivers to bring ray tracing to PS5, Xbox and AMD

The next generation of real-time visuals is ray tracing, and developers can now use the open Vulkan graphics API to integrate this technology into their games. The Khronos Group consortium announced today that 3D graphics servicer LunarG has released an updated version of the Vulkan Software Development Kit with a full suite of tools for Vulkan Ray Tracing. This opens up a viable alternative for developers outside of Microsoft’s DirectX to easily and quickly create lifelike lighting in games.

Khronos launched a version of its Vulkan Ray Tracing extension earlier in November. That was an important step because of cross-platform compatibility – while DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is only available on PC and Xbox. Vulkan is thus an API solution that can run on the special ray tracing cores in Nvidia’s RTX video cards, or it can run on the general GPU computing units in AMD’s Radeons. That’s doubly important, because you’ll find those same AMD computing units in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S.

But now that the SDK offers a full developer pipeline, Vulkan Ray Tracing should be popping up all over the place.

“The shipping API specifications were just the first step in building the developer ecosystem for Vulkan Ray Tracing,” said Khronos ray tracing boss and Nvidia engineer Daniel Koch. “We now have tools and examples that allow developers to truly take advantage of the power of cross-platform ray tracing acceleration. One of the main requests from the developer community was the ability to easily bring DXR code to Vulkan. We accomplished that by providing a carefully designed superset of DXR and integrating Vulkan Ray Tracing support into the DXC open source HLSL compiler. “

The Democratization of Quake II RTX

To this day, Nvidia dominated the discussion of ray tracing. A lot of work has gone into making RTX synonymous with the technology. But the reality is, Nvidia operated RTX as a layer on top of Microsoft’s DXR. And while that’s great for Windows and Nvidia, the popularity of ray tracing – a true next-gen, computationally expensive lighting technology – depends on its ubiquity. And that’s where the open Vulkan standard is so important.

That’s why you get something like an Nvidia engineer speaking on behalf of The Khronos Group about how high-performance ray tracing is coming not only to consoles, but AMD Radeon GPUs. It’s also how I get a press release from Nvidia in my inbox, talking about how Quake II RTX, which helped build it, is now available “to everyone”.

“By being the first game to support the recently released platform agnostic Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, Quake II RTX should play on any compatible GPU,” the Nvidia press release reads. “Quake II RTX no longer relies on vendor-specific extensions and should run on any compatible GPU.”

Quake II RTX is fully traceable, meaning that all of its lighting is done with real-time calculations for how light is emitted and reflected from dynamic objects. And both Nvidia and AMD launched new drivers today with the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions.

Of course, this isn’t a purely magnanimous piece from Nvidia. The company’s RTX GPUs are better at ray tracing than AMDs as of today. And a side-by-side comparison of Quake II RTX using the open Vulkan API can prove it. But ray tracing is still around and working on AMD GPUs, expanding the market for developers looking to support ray tracing – especially when it comes to the PS5 and Xbox.