Nvidia Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorials | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorials

github.com

128 pointsjrepinc25 comments

Maybe better with a link to https://nvpro-samples.github.io/vk_raytracing_tutorial_KHR/ as it's the actual tutorial and has all the content.

That page doesn't load. It says:

    (insert vkrt_tutorial.md.htm here)

Meanwhile the repository readme actually loads and shows useful information when loading from https://github.com/nvpro-samples/vk_raytracing_tutorial_KHR

Loaded for me.

Yeah, looks like they are doing weird stuff to load the actual content, not sure what that is about, maybe loading stuff dynamically from GitHub or something?

Looking at the source of the page, they are using some JS library called markdeep that seems to render the content, so if you don't have JS activated, it won't work. Similarly, overzealous or misconfigured adblockers would probably make it not work as well.

Do you think it's really overzealous or misconfigured to block unusual use of content?

Well, I myself use adblockers for all my browsers and I sometimes add my own rules that blocks more than I actually wanted. Are you saying it's impossible to misconfigure the blocklists in adblockers?

Just trying to help you out with figuring out what's wrong. If you don't want help or to fix the issue, maybe refrain from posting next time.

No, it's definitely possible. But I think your definition of what you want and my definition aren't wholly compatible.

AMD's RDNA 2 is expected to have hardware ray tracing acceleration. Do you think that Vulkan will adopt support for it and everything in this guide will be identical (ie, relatively hardware independent)?

Yeah, the Nvidia specific extension was NV_ray_tracing, the cross vendor one (KHR_ray_tracing) is what's shown here. The KHR one will support AMD and Intel: https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-group-releases-vu...

Shameless plug: We created a simple game engine with this technology. I am planning to upgrade it to cross-vendor ray tracing support with the upcoming Vulkan SDK. Cheers.

https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Raygun

Do you have a video demo somewhere?

No, I haven't thought about it, but it makes sense to also provide a video. I'll probably do that tomorrow and link the video in the README.

The engine comes with a tiny demo, mainly showing off reflection and refraction. At this point we don't have any binaries available online as most people interested in this project are typically developers. Building it is comparatively easy, just follow the guide referenced in the README.

Done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZSoVidqV2Q

Awesome! That looks absolutely amazing!

I don't mean to sound cynical, but, this is a long and detailed tutorial. They've clearly spent time working on it. IMO they should have tried to come up with a final result that is visually more appealing. Otherwise, people come to the tutorial and it's like, why go through all this work to recreate something that just looks meh? (a poorly lit model of a house floating on a grey flat rectangle) IMO, just a plain old Cornell box[0] would have looked better (and not been more complex to achieve).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_box

Going to go out on a limb and guess that it's because the people who would actually go through these tutorials are people who already know what can be accomplished with raytracing and want to get their feet wet with doing so in Vulkan.

The average person who's looking for "What can raytracing do for me" is going to get their answer from Control, Battlefield, Metro Exodus, or even the Quake II and Minecraft demos, and not some developer-centric Vulkan tutorial from Github.

Agreed. The meat of the tutorial is the Vulkan aspect. The final render is just scene composition and easily changed.

I agree with you. That image makes me distrust the tutorial like maybe it's not actually using ray tracing. That image certainly does not look ray traced. There is no radiance what so ever. It looks forward rendered with standard phong shading and shadow maps.

You probably are not the target audience.

As a graphics engineer, the more compelling use cases of ray tracing are things like visibility tests, which can be temporally stabilized by adding a low-discrepancy noise to each sample and used to perform leak-free global illumination. Samples can be used to feed other aspects of the pipeline like generating soft shadows, or atmospheric effects, etc.

It's an API tutorial, for professionals in the field. Ray tracing is just one tool in the toolbox, not the alpha and omega of how the frame gets composed.

I'm a single data point, but as a graphics engineer working on DDGI and having worked on SSR/SSAO, SDF shadows etc... I really do not care about the visuals of the tutorial haha. Clear greyscale images are honestly perfect for understanding exactly what's going on. The tutorial is meant to explain the mechanics, not dazzle you with a material shader.

I think it's a good decision, because it makes it clear that this just teaches you to use the Vulkan extension and doesn't have a lot of useless fluff. The screenshot is a good way to communicate this and set the expectations of the audience.

Vulkan is a very low level API and even putting a single triangle on the screen is a huge wall of C++ code, so it's necessary to keep the domain part of the example as simple as possible.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, here is a ray tracing tutorial series in Python: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8ENypDVcs3H-TxOXOzwD...

Thanks for sharing.

Interesting to see Nvidia willingly working on what for a while seemed like an open source platform that was really only being pushed for by AMD.

AMD also has another interests beyond open source.

Wondering when Vulkan will get mesh shaders.

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