Diligent Graphics > Diligent Engine > Diligent Engine 2.5: resource signatures, inline ray tracing, async compute and much more
Diligent Engine 2.5: resource signatures, inline ray tracing, async compute and much more
This is a major release that introduces a number of significant improvements:
- Pipeline resource signatures enable applications to define explicit shader resource layouts that allow sharing shader resource binding objects between different pipeline states.
- Multiple immediate contexts is an abstraction over multiple command queues that enables e.g. async compute and parallel rendering.
- Improved graphics adapter discovery provides more information about the available devices on the system.
- Inline ray-tracing is a powerful extension to ray tracing that allows casting rays from regular shaders (pixel, compute, etc.).
- Ray tracing on Metal is now also supported by Diligent Engine.
- Debug groups improve debugging and profiling experience.
- Wave operations enable sharing data between threads in one shader thread group.
- Tile shaders is a special type of shader currently only available on Metal that is similar to compute shader, but processes on-chip tile memory.
- Memoryless framebuffer attachments enable memory savings on mobile platforms.
With this release we expect the API to become much more stable and few breaking changes moving forward.
A new Tutorial 22 – Hybrid Rendering demonstrates how to implement a simple hybrid renderer that combines rasterization with ray tracing. The tutorial runs on DirectX12, Vulkan and Metal.