Last week’s Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering “SER” is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance.
The Khronos Blog today published more details on the VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder extension. The first sentence is arguably the most exciting:
“Shader Execution Reordering (SER) is one of the most effective tools for reducing issues with divergence in ray tracing workloads. For instance, a few lines of code enabled SER to improve performance in this Vulkan glTF path tracer by 47%, with similar improvements in widely used apps.”
That’s quite a nice win for the Vulkan glTF path tracer.
VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder is now the cross-vendor solution for shader execution reordering and similar to what is also found in Microsoft’s Shader Model 6.9.
Those wishing to learn more and go into all the developer details around Vulkan ray-tracing shader execution reordering can see the post in full on the Khronos.org blog authored by NVIDIA engineers.
