clray VS vulkan-compute-ray-tracing

But this is all very awkward and pointless. Pixel shaders are not designed for that, and textures are not ideal for passing such information to the GPU. Ideally, you would use OpenGL compute shaders, or any other GPU compute API, and pass your geometry in "buffers". I've written a polygon mesh raytracer like that in OpenCL once upon a time: https://github.com/jtsiomb/clray

It's better to use a compute shader than fragment because it's better parallelizable. The idea is the same as with fragment shader, you just use compute to write into a texture. I have done something similar in Vulkan, you can take a look: https://github.com/grigoryoskin/vulkan-compute-ray-tracing https://github.com/grigoryoskin/vulkan-compute-ray-tracing/blob/master/resources/shaders/source/ray-trace-compute.comp

https://github.com/grigoryoskin/vulkan-compute-ray-tracing I'm making a small ray tracer, loosely following rt in one weekend series. It renders the scene with the compute shader into a texture and then displays it with fragment shader. Currently it has only lambertian materials, but I'm working on adding PBR. I use binary volume hierarchy for acceleration, but in simple scenes I found out that just iterating through a list of triangles is faster. It has one problem though, sometimes(!) it crashes on start or finish, making me think it's some kind of synchronization issue (also discussed here). I have layout transform and semaphore between compute and graphics, which looks tight to me, but I would be super grateful if someone could point out where I am wrong. Or it could be some moltenVK bug, which would also be ok with me. I would appreciate any kind of feedback, since I'm still learning (both vk and c++)

I made a ray tracer in Vulkan, and while it runs fine on my personal Mac book air, when I try to run it on my work Mac book pro, it either crashes at start due to some memory error, or renders a blank screen. I'm trying super hard to find the issue, but I'm out of ideas. These are the only computers I have, so I'm willing to accept that it's some moltenVK issue or something, if it runs on other systems. Here is the repo with build instructions: https://github.com/grigoryoskin/vulkan-compute-ray-tracing