New Nvidia Driver Adds Vulkan Ray Tracing Extensions

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Quake II RTX gets Vulkan RT extensions as well

Quake II RTX
(Image credit: Steam)

Nvidia just released a new graphics driver this morning, version 460.89, and with it comes a very important feature for the ray tracing community, full support for Vulkan's finalized ray tracing extensions. Plus, Nvidia has updated Quake II RTX to version 1.4.0 which adds the same Vulkan RT extensions into the game.

This is great news for developers and gamers who love Ray Tracing, Vulkan's Ray Tracing extensions are fully open source which makes RT implementation much easier for developers. Now that Nvidia is onboard with the new tech, this will further increase Vulkan RT adoption due to how popular Nvidia's RT capable graphics cards have become.

If you want to download the new driver, head to GeForce Expereince or Geforce.com. If you want to check out the new Vulkan RT extensions in Quake II, head over to Steam and download it for free.

There are no bug fixes with this patch.

Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hotaru.hino
    And supposedly these extensions work regardless if the GPU has dedicated RT hardware or not. Though actual support is likely limited and there's the issue of performance running this on GPUs without dedicated RT hardware, but it's there.

    While I'm sure AMD will add support for the RX 6000 series, part of me wishes they add support down the stack. They could leverage the compute performance on some of their older cards.
    Reply
  • TechyInAZ
    spongiemaster said:
    I'm pretty sure Sony and MS required all games released needed to support the base models of the consoles, so there couldn't be a PS4 Pro only game.
    hotaru.hino said:
    And supposedly these extensions work regardless if the GPU has dedicated RT hardware or not. Though actual support is likely limited and there's the issue of performance running this on GPUs without dedicated RT hardware, but it's there.

    While I'm sure AMD will add support for the RX 6000 series, part of me wishes they add support down the stack. They could leverage the compute performance on some of their older cards.

    Adding these extensions is entirely driver-based as well. And yes these extensions will work with any GPU technically as long as the manufacturer supports it in driver.
    Reply