Posted on Friday, October 30 2020 @ 14:38 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Phoronix
reports Intel has published its first Linux patches that add Vulkan ray-tracing support to the "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver. The code are the initial core ray-tracing bits needed on the compiler side, plus some support patches for implementation.
Jason Ekstrand as the lead developer originally on the Intel ANV driver has posted today the initial ray-tracing code for ANV in order to support VK_KHR_ray_tracing for their forthcoming hardware. Today is the first time Intel has approved of this open-source code being published and more is on the way. The code today isn't enough for Vulkan ray-tracing but more is on the way and based against the latest internal Khronos ray-tracing specification. At the moment they are not focusing on the former NVIDIA-specific ray-tracing extension but may handle it in the future if game vendors continue targeting it rather than the forthcoming finalized KHR version.
This is code for the future Intel Xe-HPG based hardware, which is expected in 2021.
