Introduction to ray tracing in Vulkan
Ray tracing support in hardware was first introduced in 2018 with the NVidia RTX series. Originally, ray tracing support in Vulkan was only available through an NVidia extension, but later, the functionality was ratified through a Khronos extension to allow multiple vendors to support the ray tracing API in Vulkan. We are dedicating a full chapter just to the setup of a ray tracing pipeline, as it requires new constructs that are specific to ray tracing.
The first departure from the traditional rendering pipeline is the need to organize our scene into Acceleration Structures. These structures are needed to speed up scene traversal, as they allow us to skip entire meshes that the ray has no chance to intersect with.
These Acceleration Structures are usually implemented as a Bounded Volume Hierarchy (BVH). A BVH subdivides the scene and individual meshes into bounding boxes and then organizes them into a tree. Leaf nodes of this tree are the...
