# VulkanTriangle The minimal ray-traced example. Renders a single static triangle through `vkCmdTraceRaysKHR`. No UI. ## What it shows - `Device::Initialize()` + `Window` + swapchain bring-up. - A `DescriptorHeapVulkan` sized for one image + one buffer slot, with slot ranges allocated via the bump-allocator API (`AllocateImageSlots`, `AllocateBufferSlots`). - A `PipelineRTVulkan` built from raygen / miss / closesthit SPIR-V shaders compiled at build time. - `Mesh::Build` constructing a BLAS and `RenderingElement3D::BuildTLAS` the per-frame TLAS. - Direct descriptor writes via `vkWriteResourceDescriptorsEXT` for the swapchain views and TLAS device addresses. - `RTPass{&pipeline}` plugged into `window.passes` — the canonical way to add ray tracing to a window in this library. It's the smallest sensible test of the bindless `VK_EXT_descriptor_heap` + ray-tracing path. ## Run ```bash cd examples/VulkanTriangle crafter-build -r ``` On a working driver you should see a 1280×720 window with a triangle filling roughly the centre. **On the current NVIDIA driver the native build aborts with `VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST` the moment `traceRayEXT` runs — see below.** ## Native status — known driver fault (`VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST`) On NVIDIA driver `610.43.02` (Vulkan 1.4) the native build aborts with `VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST` on the first frame as soon as the shader reads the acceleration structure. `VK_EXT_device_fault` reports an invalid GPU read (address `~0xffff…`) plus instruction-pointer faults inside the ray-tracing shader. Commenting out the `traceRayEXT` call makes the crash disappear (the dispatch + `imageStore` path renders a solid colour fine). This was investigated thoroughly and traced to the **acceleration-structure read through `VK_EXT_descriptor_heap`**, *not* to the engine's RT setup: - The BLAS/TLAS build is correct and finishes before rendering (`Window::FinishInit` does `vkQueueWaitIdle`). The built TLAS instance has an identity transform, `mask = 0xFF`, and the correct BLAS device address. - The AS descriptor is written correctly — `vkWriteResourceDescriptorsEXT` stores the TLAS device address at the expected heap byte offset (verified by dumping the raw heap bytes after the write). - The Khronos validation layers (1.4.350, current) report **zero** errors for the whole frame, including the SBT regions handed to `vkCmdTraceRaysKHR`. - Storage images and buffers bound through the **same** descriptor heap work — with `traceRayEXT` removed, the raygen shader's `imageStore` renders correctly, so the heap binding / image path is sound. - Both the ray-tracing pipeline (`traceRayEXT`) **and** inline ray query (`rayQueryEXT`, which uses no shader binding table) fault identically when they read the acceleration structure from the heap. That isolates the fault to the AS-via-heap read, not the SBT or the RT pipeline. - The fault reproduces even with the AS descriptor written at heap byte 0 and read at shader index 0 (no descriptor offset/stride ambiguity), and is unaffected by the `pAddressRange` size. - `VK_EXT_descriptor_heap` is brand new; on this machine NVIDIA is the only implementation that advertises it (llvmpipe does not), so there is no second conformant implementation to cross-check against. **Conclusion:** this is a driver-side fault in NVIDIA's `VK_EXT_descriptor_heap` acceleration-structure path, not an engine bug. It should be reported to NVIDIA. The `traceRayEXT` call is intentionally left in `raygen.glsl` so this stays a faithful one-file reproducer; the example will start rendering the triangle again once a fixed driver ships.