Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing API announced

courtesy of PTC   Khronos has integrated Ray Tracing Pipelines into the Vulkan open standard API together with the option of ray launching from any shader and some new ways of offloading intensive setup tasks to multi-core CPUs Microsoft announced the development of a ray-tracing extension to DirectX 12 called DXR in March 2018 at the same time that Nvidia introduced its RTX hardware raytracing architecture. Cards using the RTX architecture shipped in the summer of 2018 when Nvidia introduced its revolutionary Turing series of GPUs with dedicated ray-tracing acceleration processors. Nonetheless, as good as the proprietary DXR API is,