LogInThe Khronos Group announced the public release of the Vulkan Ray Tracing provisional extensions.
The release will let developers provide feedback before the specifications are finalized. Please note that feedback will be collected through the Vulkan GitHub Issues Tracker and Khronos Developer Slack.
Vulkan Ray Tracing is said to seamlessly integrate a ray-tracing framework into the Vulkan API. It is hardware agnostic and "so can be accelerated on both existing GPU compute and dedicated ray-tracing cores if available."
“There has been strong developer demand for a truly cross-platform ray tracing acceleration API and now Vulkan Ray Tracing is here to meet that industry need,” noted Daniel Koch, senior graphics system software engineer at NVIDIA and Vulkan Ray Tracing task subgroup chair at Khronos. “The overall architecture of Vulkan Ray Tracing will be familiar to users of existing proprietary ray tracing APIs, which enables straightforward porting of existing ray traced content, but this framework also introduces new functionality and implementation flexibility.”
It is based on a number of Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL extensions. You can learn more here.