Khronos finalized Vulkan Ray Tracing specification

The Khronos Group announced it has finalized its Vulkan Ray Tracing specification. This means there's now an open alternative to NVIDIA's RTX extensions for Vulkan. There are a small number of games on the market that exclusively support NVIDIA RTX, these are Vulkan-based games. Once AMD supports the new specification, developers will be able to add support for Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs.

Today, Khronos® has released the final versions of the set of Vulkan®, GLSL and SPIR-V extension specifications that seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the existing Vulkan framework. This is a significant milestone as it is the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard for ray tracing acceleration - and can be deployed either using existing GPU compute or dedicated ray tracing cores. Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to anyone who has used DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in DirectX 12, but also introduces advanced functionality such as the ability to load balance ray tracing setup operations onto the host CPU. Although ray tracing will be first deployed on desktop systems, these Vulkan extensions have been designed to enable and encourage ray tracing to also be deployed on mobile.