Web-Based Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator | Hacker News Reader

Web-Based Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator

gsn-lib.org

81 pointsyyycomposer13 comments

The Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator is an online application that aims to simulate the ray tracing shader pipeline from the Vulkan GL EXT ray tracing specification.

To this end, a pre-compiler is provided that translates the ray tracing shader code into a classic WebGL GLSL fragment shader, which generates a direct preview of the shader's output image in the browser.

Most importantly, the emulator also allows exporting the ray tracing shader code as a C++ Vulkan project that can fully exploit the dedicated ray tracing acceleration hardware available in recent graphics cards (such as Nvidia Geforce RTX GPUs or the AMD RX 6000 series).

The web-based emulator is intended for computer graphics education or rapid prototyping of GLSL ray tracing shaders. It does not require a high-end GPU with special ray tracing hardware. Only if you want to run the exported C++ Vulkan stand-alone application, a GPU with ray tracing accelerator hardware is necessary.

A tutorial is available here: https://www.gsn-lib.org/docs/nodes/raytracing.php

This is a short demonstration of the project on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMyqDNGkr0g

I love the approach, specially not having to deal with WGSL.

Thanks for your comment. I believe WebGPU does not (yet) support accessing the ray tracing acceleration hardware. Or does it? If yes, this would be great news to me!

I regularly read the meeting minutes, I think it won't even be part of 1.0.

I'm new to this space, but interested in graphics. What are the differences and why do you prefer GLSL?

Vulkan ray tracing typically uses GLSL as shader language. DirectX Raytracing (DXR) uses HLSL (but is restricted to run only on Windows).

Because Vulkan ray tracing is cross-platform, I have chosen GLSL for this project.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/GLSL/blob/master/extensions/... https://www.khronos.org/blog/vulkan-ray-tracing-final-specif...

WGSL is the shader language of WebGPU. But I believe WebGPU does not support hardware ray tracing, yet.

Because even though I have my issues with GLSL and the way Khronos manages the ecosystem, at least GLSL has a history of an existing ecosystem that one can ping back into.

HLSL is the other big candidate, from DirectX, while Metal uses a C++14 based dialect.

Meanwhile on game consoles the shading languages are somehow flavours of either GLSL or HLSL.

WGSL, because of politics (Apple or whatever), is a mix of C++, Rust and HLSL, with a non-existing ecosystem, where they are still half way definig how the language is suppose to actually look like.

>>> web-based emulator is intended for computer graphics education

Vulkan ShaderToy in the browser! This is huge. ShaderToy is used everywhere. And a LOT of people are struggling with getting great ray tracing results.

Have you tried porting the NVPro samples?

https://github.com/nvpro-samples/build_all

Currently, compared to Shadertoy, the website is not well known. It would become more educational if more users shared their ideas. Therefore, it is important to spread the word.

Not all samples from your link are applicable for ray tracing, but I have tried to cover some basic ray tracing examples in the tutorial: https://www.gsn-lib.org/docs/nodes/raytracing.php

I really like the little diagram showing the states and how it is linked to the source code.

Any plans to support a C++ version that has GLSL fallback capabilities if the hardware doesn't support raytracing?

Off topic but as someone trying to get into GPU architecture with minimal graphics programming experience, can anyone recommend good resources for understanding the terminology related to a typical graphics processing pipeline (e.g. shaders, textures etc)?

https://learnopengl.com/Getting-started/Shaders

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