Recently, I have been working on a simple game and am trying to implement ray tracing using a GeForce RTX. Does Panda3d support this and can anyone help me do it? Thanks in advance.
Panda does not expose any of the RTX extensions. I don’t believe there even are any for OpenGL. I doubt the DirectX RTX stuff works with D3D9, which is what Panda is using. And, Panda’s Vulkan backend needs a lot of other stuff before we are at the point where we can think of extensions like these.
I’m not seeing an OpenGL extension on that page for the raytracing. Some of the other features (e.g., mesh shaders) list OpenGL extensions though.
Huh, upon looking at the title of the page, it said OpenGL and Vulkan ray tracing extensions. Maybe just odd wording on NVIDIA’s side.
Would it really be useful for Panda3D to support such a highly NVIDIA-specific feature, or would it be more prudent to wait until a cross-vendor extension becomes available–assuming that this feature actually catches on, and doesn’t just get added to the already large pile of abandoned NVIDIA-specific extensions?
As @Moguri points out, there is no OpenGL extension for it yet. The GLSL extension is only useful when using it with Vulkan.
What do you mean by this, do you mean it only works when using Vulkan, because if so, what is so wrong with the Vulkan backend for Panda3D causing it to not work with RTX?
Since my next idea was to make a fork that supported VR (which would be really cool if it was official supported), should I just throw the Vulkan RTX support in that?
And, plus RTX is highly used in games and benchmarks (as it is intensive), making it useful for game developers.
EDIT: I’ve been trying to build a fork, but can’t seem to find where NodePath is defined, can anyone help?
Panda’s Vulkan port is not yet ready to be able to handle custom shaders of any kind, let alone ray tracing shaders.
NodePath is defined in panda/src/pgraph/nodePath.h.