Implement ray tracing effects with Vulkan on Android
Review frequently asked questions
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Confirm that the device exposes the required Vulkan ray tracing extensions. Immortalis GPUs such as Immortalis‑G715, Immortalis‑G720, and Immortalis‑G925 support ray tracing, while some Mali G7‑series GPUs after Mali‑G715 might or might not depending on the phone model.
Use
VK_KHR_ray_query for most simple effects because it lets you add traversal to existing shaders. Use VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline when you need its dedicated ray-tracing shader stages and driver-managed traversal.After you build an acceleration structure, use it to represent scene geometry for fast ray-intersection tests. Vulkan exposes it through
VK_KHR_acceleration_structure; the implementation is opaque but typically tree-like.No.
VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing is independent of ray tracing. Use it when you need shaders to dynamically index arrays of buffers and textures, such as when accessing material data for ray hits.For static Bottom-Level Acceleration Structures (BLASes), use
VK_BUILD_ACCELERATION_STRUCTURE_PREFER_FAST_TRACE_BIT_KHR. For Top-Level Accelerations Structures (TLASes) and dynamic BLASes, use VK_BUILD_ACCELERATION_STRUCTURE_PREFER_FAST_BUILD_BIT_KHR, usually with VK_BUILD_ACCELERATION_STRUCTURE_ALLOW_UPDATE_BIT_KHR.