Intro to DirectX Raytracing

This repository is the code for the three part article series called 'Intro to DirectX Raytracing' by Niels Jaspers. This repository aims to make the step towards DirectX Raytracing easy for the beginner. It tries to show how to use the API and how you can utilize the most from the API.

Have a look at the samples, to get familiar with the framework and what is possible with the API. Anything from a simple triangle, to basic lighting (wip).

If you want to read my posts, have a look at the articles:

• Intro to DirectX Raytracing Part 1 (the concepts) (wip)
• Intro to DirectX Raytracing Part 2 (the implementation) (wip)
• Intro to DirectX Raytracing Part 3 (debugging the ray tracer) (wip)

Building

Dependencies

• A Windows machine
• Visual Studio 2022:
  • Desktop Development with C++ extension:
    • Windows SDK 10.0 or higher
    • HLSL Tools (?)
• A GPU with D3D12 support, shader model 6.6 support, and ray tracing capabilities.
• Git

Downloading the code

To download the code, clone the repo by using git clone https://github.com/PappaNiels/IntroDXR.git. Then to get the submodules, use git submodule update --init, to make sure you have all the dependencies.

Building the code

To build the code, first run the SetupDirectories.bat scripts to setup the directories and the symbolic links. Open the visual studio solution and select the sample you want to view, by setting the start project to the sample project. Press F5 to build and run with the debugger attached, or press ctrl + b on the sample project to just build the executable. As last, you need to set the working directory to $(OutDir) in the project settings under Debugging. This way, the resources will be available directly from the executable and via running it through visual studio.

How to use

Soon!

Command line arguments

• -validation : Enables the validation layers.
• -console : Opens a console window as a logger.
• -warp : Use Microsoft's software renderer for the rendering, rather than the dedicated GPU. This would be useful to ensure that the DirectX API gets used properly, and use features that are not available for your GPU.

License

This codebase that can be found under code/ and the data that is in data/ falls under the MIT license as seen in LICENSE. The code in vendor/ falls under the vendor's own license respectively.

Contributing

If there are bugs, ways to optimize the code, or make it a better structure to make the library easier to use. Feel free to contribute to the repository.

Contact

If there are any concerns or questions, reach out to me via my contact details or discord (pappaniels).