The Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator is an online application that aims to simulate the ray tracing shader pipeline from the Vulka

Tutorial: Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator

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2021-06-08 06:30:14

The Vulkan GLSL Ray Tracing Emulator is an online application that aims to simulate the ray tracing shader pipeline from the Vulkan GL EXT ray tracing specification.

To this end, a pre-compiler is provided that translates the ray tracing shader code into a classic WebGL GLSL fragment shader, which generates a direct preview of the shader's output image in the browser.

Most importantly, the emulator also allows exporting the ray tracing shader code as a C++ Vulkan project that can fully exploit the dedicated ray tracing acceleration hardware available in recent graphics cards (such as Nvidia Geforce RTX GPUs or the AMD RX 6000 series).

The web-based emulator is intended for computer graphics education or rapid prototyping of GLSL ray tracing shaders. It does not require a high-end GPU with special ray tracing hardware. Only if you want to run the exported C++ Vulkan stand-alone application, a GPU with ray tracing accelerator hardware is necessary.

To keep the interface as simple and accessible as possible, the online emulator provides only a limited choice of pre-defined 3D meshes and textures. However, the ray tracing shader code from the emulator can also be copied into the ImageShader plugin node of the GSN Composer, which allows providing custom uniform variables, 3D meshes, and textures via the GSN Composer's visual interface. The other option is to export the shader as a Vulkan C++ project, which also allows changing the loaded 3D meshes and textures.