New Vulkan Extension Boosts Ray-Tracing Performance

The Khronos Group has announced that Shader Execution Reordering in Vulkan has advanced from a vendor-specific extension, VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder, to a multi-vendor Vulkan extension, VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder. Now, this powerful optimization technique can be used across vendors and APIs with similar SER support in Microsoft’s Shader Model 6.9. In benchmarked use cases like the Vulkan glTF path tracer, SER has already shown up to 47% improvements. The blog also walks through best practices, API usage, and hints for maximizing coherency.