Vulkan API
Vulkan is a new-generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-vendor access to GPUs. Maintained by The Khronos Group, Vulkan stands as the industry’s only open standard modern GPU API, and is unique in enabling developers to create applications that are portable to multiple platforms. Vulkan supports cutting-edge graphics technologies, including ray tracing, and is fully integrated into NVIDIA’s production drivers for NVIDIA® GeForce®, RTX™, and Quadro® solutions on Windows and Linux, and the Jetson™ embedded computing platform using Android or Linux.
Vulkan at NVIDIA
NVIDIA consistently provides industry leadership to evolve new Vulkan functionality such as ray tracing, NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) AI rendering, deployment in safety-critical systems, and is often the first to make these innovations available to developers. The NVIDIA Nsight™ suite of development tools has fully integrated support for Vulkan, including debugging and optimizing applications using full ray-tracing functionality. NVIDIA ships Vulkan in PCs, embedded and automotive platforms, and data centers. NVIDIA continues to support the latest Vulkan API features across multiple GPU generations, extending back to Maxwell™ architecture cards, ensuring gamers benefit from ongoing API improvements even on older hardware.
Open-Source Vulkan Samples
NVIDIA provides a growing collection of Vulkan and OpenGL samples and tutorials with full source code available on GitHub.
Developers can access a range of samples tailored to their interests—from introductory tutorials on basic Vulkan workflows and extensions to advanced demonstrations of complex geometric rendering and ray tracing, as well as professional application use cases.
The repository also includes utility code to accelerate Vulkan development.
RTX Ray Tracing in Vulkan
The Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions seamlessly integrate ray tracing into the Vulkan API, making Vulkan the industry’s first open, cross-vendor, cross-platform standard that can be used to access RTX ray-tracing acceleration.
In December 2020, ray tracing support was added to the Khronos Vulkan SDK, and NVIDIA included Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions in its production drivers. This support extends to all RTX GPUs as well as the GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce GTX 1060+ cards with at least 6GB of memory.
NVIDIA has also released Quake II RTX that uses Vulkan Ray Tracing to significantly enhance the visual quality of this well-loved classic. Running with ray-traced lighting, shadows, and reflections, Quake II RTX is the world’s first cross-vendor ray-tracing Vulkan application. NVIDIA released the full source code on GitHub, serving as a great example for developers who want all the details of how this remastering was achieved.
Get Started With Vulkan Ray Tracing
NVIDIA has released a number of tutorials, open-source samples, and other materials to help developers utilize Vulkan Ray Tracing:
A Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorial on effective use of using the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions
A tutorial on how to use Vulkan Ray Tracing to create a complete mini-path tracer
A Vulkan-based glTF ray tracer viewer with open source on GitHub
Blog on Vulkan Ray Tracing Best Practices for Hybrid Rendering as used in Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Read about how the 2020.6 release of the NVIDIA Nsight Graphics tool supports Vulkan Ray Tracing
Vulkan Developer Tools
Nsight Graphics
NVIDIA Nsight Graphics is a standalone developer tool with ray tracing support. It enables debugging, profiling, and exporting of captured frames built with Vulkan, Vulkan SC, Vulkan Ray Tracing, and OpenGL.
Nsight Systems
NVIDIA Nsight Systems is a system-wide performance analysis tool. Designed to visualize an application’s algorithms, to identify the largest opportunities to optimize and tune to scale efficiently across any quantity or size of CPUs and GPUs.
Nsight Aftermath SDK
Nsight Aftermath SDK is a library that easily integrates into a Vulkan game’s crash reporter to generate GPU “mini-dumps” when an exception or TDR occurs, exposing pipeline information to resolve an unexpected crash.
Browse TutorialsLearn More About Nsight Tools
Vulkan Video
High-performance, vendor-neutral video processing in NVIDIA’s Vulkan Drivers
Vulkan Video provides developers with a powerful and flexible cross-platform video processing API by seamlessly integrating hardware-accelerated stream compression and decompression with the full power of the Vulkan API. With flexible, fine-grained control over scheduling, synchronization, and memory allocation—Vulkan Video enables developers to combine GPU rendering, compute acceleration, and video processing within a single, efficient runtime.
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