Task list for Vulkan Ray Tracing Provisional release

[dgkoch]

Today the Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Task Sub Group (TSG) is announcing the public release of the provisional Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions. See the Press Release for the announcement.

The provisional version of Vulkan Ray Tracing that we are releasing today consists of 3 Vulkan, 2 SPIR-V, and 2 GLSL extensions. See the introductory blog post for more details and an overview of the functionality.

Vulkan Specifications:

• VK_KHR_ray_tracing
• VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations
• VK_KHR_pipeline_library

SPIR-V Specifications:

• SPV_KHR_ray_tracing
• SPV_KHR_ray_query

GLSL Extension Specifications:

• GLSL_EXT_ray_tracing
• GLSL_EXT_ray_query

Khronos welcomes feedback on the Vulkan Ray Tracing set of provisional specifications from the developer and content creation communities through the Khronos Developer Slack and Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker. Developers are also encouraged to share comments with their preferred hardware vendors.
Your feedback is critical to enable us to finalize the first version of Vulkan Ray Tracing and make it genuinely meet your needs!

However, as this is a provisional release, some functionality is likely to change before the final release, consequently we are asking that driver vendors not ship it in production drivers and that ISVs not use the provisional version in production applications.

Applications using the provisional functionality must specifically opt into the interfaces being defined in the Vulkan header using one of the following techniques (similar to the process for enabling the windowing system extensions), either by:

#define VK_ENABLE_BETA_EXTENSIONS
#include <vulkan/vulkan.h>

or by

#include <vulkan/vulkan_core.h>
#include <vulkan/vulkan_beta.h>

and should also check for the exact Vulkan extension version that they are expecting.

Although we do not have a specific timeframe to announce for specification finalization, we want to move forward as quickly as we can, while ensuring the developer community is happy and we have a completed set of conformance tests and at least two implementations that can pass those tests.

The task list for the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional release is:

• Vulkan specification: https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/#apispecs (owner: @oddhack)
• SPIR-V specifications: Add provisional SPV_KHR ray tracing extensions SPIRV-Registry#64 (owner: @dgkoch, @johnkslang )
• GLSL specifications: Add GLSL_EXT ray tracing extensions GLSL#114 (owner: @dgkoch, @johnkslang )
• Vulkan headers: in master (via Update for Vulkan-Docs 1.2.135 Vulkan-Headers#105) (owner: @oddhack)
• SPIRV Headers: in master (via Add SPV_KHR_ray_{tracing,query} to headers SPIRV-Headers#149) (owner: @johnkslang )
• SPIRV-Tools: in master (via Add support for KHR_ray_{query,tracing} extensions SPIRV-Tools#3235) (owner: @dneto0, @s-perron)
• glslang support: (owner: @johnkslang )
  • update to latest SPIR-V header
  • GLSL_EXT_ray_tracing / SPV_KHR_ray_tracing - Add support for GLSL_EXT_ray_tracing glslang#2130 (owner: @alelenv, @dgkoch)
  • GLSL_EXT_ray_query / SPV_KHR_ray_query - GL_EXT_ray_query updates glslang#2139 (owner: @Tobski )
  • bug fix merged to master (via GL_EXT_ray_query pass-by-reference issues glslang#2157)
  • bug fix merged to master (via GL_EXT_ray_query accelerationStructureEXT  glslang#2159)
  • bug fix merged to master (via Error out assignments to objects of rayQueryEXT type. glslang#2166)
• shaderc support: (owner: @dneto0, @dgkoch)
  • updates all tools for provisional ray tracing: in master (via Update all tools: support provisional ray-tracing google/shaderc#1006) (owner: @dnet0)
  • remove NV_EXTENSIONS define: in master (via Remove NV_EXTENSIONS conditionals google/shaderc#1003) (owner: @dgkoch )
  • pick up ray query support Roll glslang dependency google/shaderc#1018
  • known_good update (via Update to SPIRV-Tools 2020.2 fixes miscompile google/shaderc#1022)
  • SDK-Candidiate DEP update (via Roll glslang dependency to SDK-candidate tag google/shaderc#1024)
  • SDK-Candidate2 known good update (via Update Glslang google/shaderc#1025 @dneto0)
  • SDK-Candidate-2 DEP update (via update glslang to SDK-Candidate-2 tag google/shaderc#1027) (@dgkoch)
  • SDK-Candidate-2 known_good update (via Update Glslang to SDK-candidate-2 google/shaderc#1033) (@dneto0)
• DXC support: (owner: @alelenv, @Tobski )
  • SPV_KHR_ray_tracing - in master (via Add support for SPV_KHR_ray_tracing. microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler#2780) (owner: @alelenv )
  • SPV_KHR_ray_query (Implement SPV_KHR_ray_query generation microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler#2834) (owner: @jiaolu)
• Validation Layer support: in master (via Implement VK_KHR_ray_tracing validation Vulkan-ValidationLayers#1632) (owner: @jeffbolznv )
• Vulkan SDK: https://vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home available now (owner: @mikew-lunarg )

Public installable Vulkan Ray Tracing Provisional (aka Beta) drivers are available for download from the following vendors at the supplied URLs:

• AMD: url
• Intel: url
• NVIDIA: https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver

[mikew-lunarg]

I've updated SDK release to "first half of April", which depends on updates from other upstream repos.

[starbucksDave]

Slight error in this post: the macro to enable the beta extensions is VK_ENABLE_BETA_EXTENSIONS and not VK_ENABLE_BETA_EXTENSIONS_KHR. Sorry for the nitpick!

[dgkoch]

@dgkoch Ah ok understood. As to not further clog up this issue with an unrelated thread, please can you use the Hide function instead of the Delete function (as I do still want to receive notifications as well as I want people to see why comments have been deleted)

Done. I was unaware of that option. Thanks for pointing it out.

[dgkoch]

Slight error in this post: the macro to enable the beta extensions is VK_ENABLE_BETA_EXTENSIONS and not VK_ENABLE_BETA_EXTENSIONS_KHR. Sorry for the nitpick!

🤦‍♂ Doh. That was a last minute change I forgot to reflect in the documentation. Corrected above (and soon in the blog post as well).

[dneto0]

I updated Shaderc's known-good branch with a build with necessary support from SPIRV-Tools, SPIRV-Headers, Glslang, and Shaderc itself. google/shaderc#1006

[dgkoch]

Validation layer support has been merged.

[dgkoch]

I updated Shaderc's known-good branch with a build with necessary support from SPIRV-Tools, SPIRV-Headers, Glslang, and Shaderc itself. google/shaderc#1006

@dneto0 can we get another shaderc update to include KhronosGroup/glslang#2139 ?

[dgkoch]

I updated Shaderc's known-good branch with a build with necessary support from SPIRV-Tools, SPIRV-Headers, Glslang, and Shaderc itself. google/shaderc#1006

@dneto0 can we get another shaderc update to include KhronosGroup/glslang#2139 ?

See google/shaderc#1018

[mikew-lunarg]

SDK is live

https://vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home

[dgkoch]

DXC support for ray query has been merged.
microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler#2834

This completes the provisional release.