The Diligent Engine, a cross platform open source rendering framework, just released version 2.4g, which adds raytracing support. We previously covered Diligent Engine in 2019 and since then there have been steady improvements. The engine provides cross platform rendering capabilities that work with several low level rendering SDKs including OpenGL, DirectX 11/12 and Vulkan. The new raytracing support works with the DX12 and Vulkan backends.
Details of the 2.4g release:
The latest release v2.4.g adds support for arguably the most innovative GPU capability of recent years: hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Ray tracing is supported in D3D12 and Vulkan backends and is exposed through common easy-to use yet fully exhaustive API: exactly the same host code works in both backends. Similar to other shader types, ray-tracing shaders authored in HLSL will work in both backends verbatim. Vulkan backend also supports GLSL as well as SPIRV bytecode.
A new tutorial demonstrates how ray tracing API in Diligent Engine can be used to simulate physics-based light transport in a scene to render soft shadows, multiple-bounce reflections and refractions, and dispersion.
There are further new features detailed in the release notes.
DE is available here, with the source code available on GitHub. The Diligent Engine isn’t the only option when it comes to cross platform rendering frameworks, with other options including bgfx and Wicked Engine, both of which are free, open source and cross platform solutions.
You can learn more about DE and the 2.4g release in the video below.