Quoting: Purple Library GuyApple have been such tools about this stuff.

They really really don't like having their destiny under someone else's control. Which isn't that surprising, given the history of the company. But it does make them somewhat difficult to work with.

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Quoting: gustavoyaraujoI'm not very into this... But, does it mean We will get a better performance in games we already play on proton? Any example?

What this means is that Vulkan games that do ray tracing (of which there are currently two) can be run on AMD or Intel hardware as well as on Nvidia hardware; Nvidia have had hardware that can accelerate ray tracing for a couple of years, AMD have just released their own (and the consoles), and Intel are due to release theirs next year. The number of games that use Vulkan, and the number of games that use ray tracing, are both likely to go up over time, particularly as hardware to do it becomes more widespread.

It also means that games that use DirectX for ray tracing (which will work on Windows on AMD and Intel hardware, as well as on Nvidia hardware) now have something to be translated to so that they'll able to be made to run on Linux (through Proton). There are more than two of those. It was difficult to do before, and would have only worked for hardware from one company.

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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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