I’m excited to announce Raycore.jl, a high-performance ray-triangle intersection engine with BVH acceleration for both CPU and GPU execution in Julia.
Raycore will power a new raytracing backend for Makie, bringing photorealistic rendering to the ecosystem.
We factored out the ray intersection engine since it can be used in many different areas, so we’re very curious to see what the community will create with it and how far we can push the performance over the years.
The package includes interactive tutorials covering everything from basics to advanced GPU optimization.
Key features:
Fast BVH construction and traversal
CPU and GPU support via KernelAbstractions.jl
Analysis tools for radiosity and thermal applications
Written in simple and pure Julia - contributions should be much easier than for most other ray intersection libraries
I guess it’s possible, but the question is how we’d integrate it.
As long as we dont have proper Julia → SPIR-V compilation, we wouldn’t be able to hand it Julia callbacks for the shading… Although once we have that, and I heard we could have it, it would certainly be a killer feature.
Meanwhile, we could create an API compatible pure Vulkan + GLSL backend, which then has to implement shading in another language, but should be super fast.
I’m asking because I recently came in contact with some people who use Vulkan (in C++ with a Python frontend) for vendor independent (but RTX-capable) optics simulations for physics. I think the Vulkan.jl wrapper exposes the relevant API-calls for BVH and batched ray-triangle intersection (I’m really not an expert though), but I don’t know what the cost/latency of copying data back and forth between the backends (with shading and so on done via KernelAbstractions) would be. If we had a direct SPIR-V KA-backend on top of Vulkan.jl …
I definitely think we could have something like that in the future, completely in Julia
Not sure when we’ll manage to get proper SPIRV support running, but the puzzle pieces seem to be all there.
