Vulkan has officially included ray-tracing in its API as it is the first solution that is 100% compatible with any GPU manufacturer and can run in AMD, Intel or Nvidia without dedicated ray-tracing hardware.
In addition to this general support, Vulkan worked with Nvidia to support the Nvidia RTX SDK that the developers were already using, so the same working methodology can now be applied to Vulkan. We’ve also worked with Nvidia to use the RT cores in the graphics they have, which of course speeds up performance when enabling ray tracing.
Nvidia is the only vendor that already has drivers that support this new standard (for now only for Linux), while AMD said it plans to support all these new features and will work with developers to integrate them into their products to achieve the highest performance. Intel also mentioned that they plan to release Xe graphics with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and that they will provide full support for Vulcan ray tracing.