# GPSnoopy/RayTracingInVulkan

Implementation of Peter Shirley's Ray Tracing In One Weekend book using Vulkan and NVIDIA's RTX extension.

Repository: https://github.com/GPSnoopy/RayTracingInVulkan
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/raytracinginvulkan
Language: C++
License: BSD-3-Clause
License Family: permissive
Topics: vulkan, ray-tracer, rtx
Last push: 2025-06-26T09:33:53+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 35/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 28, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 2727, "days_push": 433, "days_rel": 433, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 1}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1513, forks 134 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:56.246270+00:00)

## What it is
A real-time GPU ray tracer implementing Peter Shirley's 'Ray Tracing in One Weekend' using Vulkan's hardware ray tracing extension (VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline). It renders procedural spheres and OBJ geometry at interactive frame rates with a Dear ImGui UI for tweaking renderer parameters.

## Use cases
- learn hardware-accelerated ray tracing with Vulkan RTX
- render Ray Tracing in One Weekend scenes in real time on an RTX GPU
- see a reference implementation of VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline in C++
- experiment with path tracing parameters like bounces and samples interactively
- load OBJ meshes like the Stanford Lucy into a real-time ray tracer

## When to choose
- you have an NVIDIA RTX (or other hardware ray tracing capable) GPU and want interactive path tracing
- you want a compact, readable C++/Vulkan codebase to study real-time ray tracing
- you're following Shirley's books and want a GPU-accelerated companion implementation

## When to avoid
- you need a production renderer with denoising, instancing optimizations, or offline quality output
- your GPU lacks hardware ray tracing support
- you want a general-purpose 3D engine or modeling tool rather than a ray tracing demo

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: active
- function: graphics, simulation, gui
- domain: graphics, developer-tools
- platform: windows, cpp, cross-platform
- tags: ray-tracing, vulkan, nvidia-rtx, real-time-rendering, imgui, path-tracing, learning-project, game-development, linux, gpu

## Member repositories
- GPSnoopy/RayTracingInVulkan (main) score 35

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:56.246270+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:32:13.739196+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/GPSnoopy/RayTracingInVulkan (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:56.246270+00:00, sha 36cd9ec90d2e)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.