Sascha Willems

After adding a basic Nvidia RTX ray tracing example last week, I spent some more time with Vulkan and the VK_NV_ray_tracing extension. The result are two new, more advanced examples that I just uploaded to my Vulkan C++ example repository. As with the basic example I tried to keep them as straight forward as possible with all the relevant code parts put into one source file, so that following and building upon is as easy as possible. [Read More]

With all the new Turing extensions that NVIDIA has released alongside it’s new GPU architecture, I decided to replace my GTX 980 with a RTX 2060, mainly for the purpose of doing RTX ray-tracing related Vulkan stuff and also checking out things like mesh and task shaders. Getting my first RTX accelerated ray tracing example up and running was pretty easy, thanks to tutorials like the one from NVIDIA and iOrange. [Read More]

I have released an updated version of the SPIR-V Extension to the Visual Studio Marketplate. If you already have this installed in Visual Studio, you can update it from the extension window. Version 0.6 adds support for Visual Studio 19 and nvidia’s new turing shader extension, allowing you to generate SPIR-V from the IDE for ray tracing (generation, hit, miss, etc.), mesh and task shaders. Supported shader extensions: .vert (Vertex shader) . [Read More]

I have just pushed the first big fundamental update to the Vulkan hardware database since it went live in february 2016. With more than 5,000 reports uploaded it already contains lots of valuable data, but I felt that the visualization was lacking. When creating the Vulkan hardware database, I took the same approach as with the OpenGL and OpenGL ES database, making the web front-end more or less as pretty view of the database setup. [Read More]

Introduction This short tutorial deals with Vulkan’s viewport setup, which differs from the one in OpenGL and other APIs. I’ll try to explain what it takes to get your (OpenGL) scene rendered properly, and how e.g. VK_KHR_MAINTENANCE1 can help you deal with differences across the APIs, something that’s esp. helpful if you try to add Vulkan as a backend to you renderer without wanting to alter your actual scene data. [Read More]

I have pushed an update to my Vulkan glTF PBR 2.0 application that adds support for rendering primitives without indices. Up until now, all primitives of a glTFs scene had to come with indices to be rendered by the application, which is usually the case for more complex scenes. After getting a request for this, and checking with the glTF 2.0 spec, primitives without indices are actually a valid glTF 2. [Read More]

Introduction Ever since starting to work on my C++ Vulkan glTF PBR application, I was bugged by the fact that it just wouldn’t work on my everyday phone, just crashing at a certain point with an error code that actually should never be thrown by that certain function. After a few unsuccessful attempts at finding the cause for this, I finally found the root of the problem and was actually able to get this up and running. [Read More]

Version 1.92 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android).

This version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for reading additional features and properties for the following extensions:

• VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8
• VK_KHR_shader_float_controls
• VK_EXT_fragment_density_map

You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php.

I have released a small update of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer to 1.91 for Windows and Linux. It adds support for reading the features of the recently added VK_EXT_transform_feedback extension and replaces the experimental VK_NVX_raytracing extension with VK_NV_ray_tracing. You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php. New features for the online Hardware Database The online hardware database at https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org also got a few new features and now also has dedicated listings and pages for properties and features that are specific to extension. [Read More]

Version 1.9 of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android).

This version fully supports Vulkan 1.1 and adds support for reading additional features and properties for the following extensions:

• VK_KHR_driver_properties
• VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64
• VK_NVX_raytracing
• VK_NV_mesh_shader
• VK_NV_shading_rate_image
• VK_NV_compute_shader_derivatives
• VK_AMD_shader_core_properties

You can download the new version from https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/download.php.