Rasterization has been the dominant method to produce interactive graphics, but increasing performance of graphics hardware has made ray tracing a viable option for interactive rendering. Being able to integrate ray tracing with traditional rasterization makes it easier for applications to incrementally add ray traced effects to existing applications or to do hybrid approaches with rasterization for primary visibility and ray tracing for secondary queries.

Ray queries are available to all shader types, including graphics, compute and ray tracing pipelines. Ray queries are not able to launch additional shaders, instead returning traversal results to the calling shader.

This extension adds support for the following SPIR-V extension in Vulkan:

• SPV_KHR_ray_query

Sample Code

Example of ray query in a GLSL shader, illustrating how to use ray queries to determine whether a given position (at ray origin) is in shadow or not, by tracing a ray towards the light, and checking for any intersections with geometry occluding the light.

rayQueryEXT rq;

rayQueryInitializeEXT(rq, accStruct, gl_RayFlagsTerminateOnFirstHitEXT, cullMask, origin, tMin, direction, tMax);

// Traverse the acceleration structure and store information about the first intersection (if any)
rayQueryProceedEXT(rq);

if (rayQueryGetIntersectionTypeEXT(rq, true) == gl_RayQueryCommittedIntersectionNoneEXT) {
    // Not in shadow
}

VK_KHR_ray_query

Name String

VK_KHR_ray_query

Extension Type

Device extension

Registered Extension Number

349

Revision

1

Extension and Version Dependencies

VK_KHR_spirv_1_4 and VK_KHR_acceleration_structure

Contact

• Daniel Koch dgkoch

Other Extension Metadata

Last Modified Date

2020-11-12

Interactions and External Dependencies

• This extension requires SPV_KHR_ray_query
• This extension provides API support for GLSL_EXT_ray_query

Contributors

• Matthäus Chajdas, AMD
• Greg Grebe, AMD
• Nicolai Hähnle, AMD
• Tobias Hector, AMD
• Dave Oldcorn, AMD
• Skyler Saleh, AMD
• Mathieu Robart, Arm
• Marius Bjorge, Arm
• Tom Olson, Arm
• Sebastian Tafuri, EA
• Henrik Rydgard, Embark
• Juan Cañada, Epic Games
• Patrick Kelly, Epic Games
• Yuriy O’Donnell, Epic Games
• Michael Doggett, Facebook/Oculus
• Andrew Garrard, Imagination
• Don Scorgie, Imagination
• Dae Kim, Imagination
• Joshua Barczak, Intel
• Slawek Grajewski, Intel
• Jeff Bolz, NVIDIA
• Pascal Gautron, NVIDIA
• Daniel Koch, NVIDIA
• Christoph Kubisch, NVIDIA
• Ashwin Lele, NVIDIA
• Robert Stepinski, NVIDIA
• Martin Stich, NVIDIA
• Nuno Subtil, NVIDIA
• Eric Werness, NVIDIA
• Jon Leech, Khronos
• Jeroen van Schijndel, OTOY
• Juul Joosten, OTOY
• Alex Bourd, Qualcomm
• Roman Larionov, Qualcomm
• David McAllister, Qualcomm
• Spencer Fricke, Samsung
• Lewis Gordon, Samsung
• Ralph Potter, Samsung
• Jasper Bekkers, Traverse Research
• Jesse Barker, Unity
• Baldur Karlsson, Valve