Download Kickstart RT SDK

System Requirements


v1.0
Operating Systems
Windows 10, Ubuntu 20.04 (including ARM CPU)
Supported GPUs
Any GPU with D3D12 DXR or Vulkan ray tracing support.
Supported Drivers
Latest drivers for your GPU
Development Environment
See GitHub build instructions for detailed requirements to build or integrate.



Kickstart RT SDK


The Kickstart RT SDK enables developers to get realistic dynamic lighting into their game engines in a much shorter timespan than traditional methods.






Release Notes

Kickstart RT SDK v1.0

Features:

  • RegisterGeometry can now accept multiple vertex/index pairs for input
  • New DirectLightTransfer tasks
  • New functionality to control BVH’s of individuals render tasks
  • Can now allocate single descriptor heap for all render tasks
  • New ray tracing workload optimizations
  • NRD updated to v3.9.2




FAQ

A: It is for any developer who is unable to make use of current D3D12/Vulkan techniques for ray tracing such as D3D11 API limitation; unable to bind complete material systems to binding tables; not enough development time to fully implement ray tracing.


A: Kickstart RT will work on any hardware that supports ray tracing.


A: It requires any ray tracing compatible APIs. For example, this can be D3D12 on Windows systems. In the case where an application uses the D3D11 API with Kickstart RT, the library will use D3D12 “under the hood” to perform ray tracing operations.


A: No. NVIDIA RTXGI is a probe based ray traced global illumination solution. Kickstart RT uses a world space direct lighting cache generated from existing raster gbuffer information and uses that to ray trace reflections, GI, AO and/or shadows.


A: Kickstart RT is designed to provide a ray tracing solution to engines that are unable to implement traditional “native” RT. However, it does maintain a BVH internally that could be used for custom ray tracing operations, providing a hybrid solution.


A: Please check the GitHub repository and/or the product page for the full list of ray tracing features.


A: The SDK is open source and can be ported to run on consoles. However, it has not been tested or verified for console support.


A: Kickstart RT provides a range of options that can be used to scale the performance or image quality. Please check the github documentation for details.





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