Nvidia Game Ready Driver v460.89 brings support for Vulkan Ray Tracing; Quake II RTX updated

Nvidia has just made a significant announcement regarding the future of graphics in video games. As part of the announcement, the company has just revealed support for Vulkan Ray Tracing. The company rolled out a new Game Ready Driver that brings Vulkan Ray Tracing support to the masses. In addition, the company also updated its Quake II RTX version with the support of Vulkan Ray Tracing. Interested players can head to Steam to download the Quake II RTX version to test the “new industry standard”. Let's check everything we know regarding the Vulkan Ray Tracing in the latest Nvidia Game Ready Driver here.

Nvidia Game Ready Driver Vulkan Ray Tracing support out; details

According to the announcement, Nvidia noted that it took multiple years to develop Ray Tracing for Vulkan graphics. In fact, the company teamed up with several companies including Khronos to help the evolution of Vulkan. Nvidia outlined that it led the Vulkan Ray Tracing “subgroup” at Khronos and contributed its vendor extension design. It also “shipped the drivers for the provisional version” of Vulkan Ray Tracing for developer feedback. After all this work, the company is the first “to adopt” these Ray Tracing extensions in a working video game. Nvidia outlined that Vulkan Ray Tracing is not limited to its GeForce RTX graphics cards. Instead, it expands beyond GeForce and the Ray Tracing should work “on any compatible GPU” in the market.

The company reiterated that Quake II RTX “no longer relies on vendor-specific extensions” for Ray Tracing. Digging deeper, Nvidia also stated that Quake II RTX is “the world’s first” “fully path-traced” title in the market. For some context, patch-tracing is a ray-tracing technique that “unifies all lighting effects” in one single ray-tracing algorithm. These effects include shadows, reflections, refractions, and more.

We also got to know that Nvidia has added a “built-in benchmark” in the Quake II RTX title as part of the new update. This will help customers gauge the performance of different GPUs in the Vulkan Ray Tracing support. For some context, Quake II RTX Demo is available for free on Steam with three levels. However, one can also purchase the complete game to access all the levels. Finally, the company also rolled out updated developer tools with Vulkan Ray Tracing. This will ensure that more developers and gaming studios will add Ray Tracing support to their games in the future.