Quoting: Luke_NukemWas there any comment ont he Nvidia side about Quake II RTX being updated?

The pull request for switching it over is here [External Link], if you want to keep an eye on it. Having support in mainline drivers is a necessary first step.

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Quoting: EhvisThanks. I hope that this is true for translation layers as well as the code itself. As I understand it, the RT work for vkd3d was never continued because of problematic differences between the two.

It was for vkd3d that they did those changes, really.

The change in the final Vulkan Ray Tracing functionality that will have the most impact on applications is the creation and layout of acceleration structures.

We received feedback from authors of API translation layers (such as vkd3d-proton) that it would be impractical to layer DXR on top of the provisional API Vulkan Ray Tracing acceleration structure. This resulted in changes to a sized acceleration structure creation and using allocation of acceleration structure storage on a VkBuffer instead of dedicated acceleration structure object storage.

So, yeah, hopefully Nvidia's non-beta driver and Mesa's AMD and Intel bits will expose support for the finalised extension in short order, and vkd3d will start using it.

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Quoting: EhvisWas anything achieved in getting the DXR to Vulkan RT mapping to be easier or didn't the notes elaborate on that?

They certainly seem to think so. They have a chart (Figure 5 in their notes) comparing the two, and they say

It is straightforward to port code between the two APIs including re-use of ray tracing shaders written in HLSL

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: CatKillerUgh. So they just told everyone not to use it for 8 months for literally no reason. Great.

No, they sought feedback from lots of industry vendors across the board. As part of that, as noted, it was split up into multiple extensions so people could use part or all of it. Plus numerous other smaller changes asked by others.

I was reading through the notes as you were writing this, and already edited my comment.

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Any indication from anywhere what the hold up was? I'd imagine that AMD and Intel not having hardware to support it would have left the aims of the extension fuzzy at the beginning, but they'd have known what was going into their silicon a long time ago. Was it an oversight? Or some tricky problem that needed solving?

Still, I'm glad it's finally here, and hopefully the delay hasn't lost Vulkan critical time with developer mindshare relative to DirectX 12.

Edit:

They've also confirmed that the overall functionality has been unchanged since the provisional release.

Ugh. So they just told everyone not to use it for 8 months for literally no reason. Great.

Edit 2:
So, reading through the notes it seems that the problem was trying to have both easy mapping from DXR to Vulkan and easy mapping of Vulkan to Metal. It turns out that they can't have both, and they've decided to ditch Metal. That makes sense for our use-case, but it sucks for Khronos, since MoltenVK was an explicit target for them. I can see why they wouldn't want to take that decision quickly.

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Quoting: subThis?

https://twitter.com/CyberpunkGame/status/1012760227148587009 [External Link]

That thread, yeah; there's more than the one tweet.

Anyway, sorry for the derail.

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Quoting: PalancaWhat is your problem with CP2077? if i may ask...

I've got no opinion on the game. It might be great, it might be terrible: we'll see when they stop crunching their devs and release it.

CDPR, though, are Linux-hostile, and used the CP2077 Twitter account to mock people for wanting a Linux Galaxy client.

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Quoting: PalancaHave CP2077 in Linux on the same release day with the new version of Proton. It would be incredible.

Nobody buying it, on any platform, so that it's a complete flop, would be a better outcome.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI have a cunning strategy for dealing with this situation:
Wait.

That's so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.

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In a move that's sure to raise a few eyebrows, the Blender Foundation has announced that Facebook has joined the Blender Development Fund.

It's not really that big a deal: others have already shown that donating money to Blender is an easy and cheap way to get some positive PR, and I'd imagine that they would like people to be able to make game assets so they can sell them in their games store to run on their games hardware.

More interesting is oomd, which is a proper open source infrastructure product out of Facebook that serves a genuine need in the Linux ecosystem. They had an itch that needed scratching, and everyone benefits, exactly as it should be.

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