Vulkan gets tools, drivers to bring ray tracing to PS5, Xbox, and AMD

The next generation of real-time visuals is ray tracing, and developers can now turn to the open Vulkan graphics API to bring this tech into their games. The Khronos Group consortium announced today that 3D graphics servicer LunarG released an updated version of the Vulkan Software Development Kit that has a full suite of tools for Vulkan Ray Tracing. This opens up a viable alternative for devs beyond Microsoft’s DirectX to simply and quickly create lifelike lighting in games .

Khronos has previously launched a version of its Vulkan Ray Tracing extension in November. That was an important step due to its compatibility across platforms — whereas DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is only available on PC and Xbox. So Vulkan is an API solution that can run on the dedicated ray-tracing cores in Nvidia’s RTX video cards, or it can run on the general GPU compute units in AMD’s Radeons. That’s doubly important because you’ll find those same AMD compute units in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.