950059c86e
Reading an acceleration structure through VK_EXT_descriptor_heap aborts with VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST on NVIDIA 610.43.02 — a brand-new-extension driver fault isolated in #7 (engine setup is correct and validation-clean; images/buffers through the same heap work, and both traceRayEXT and inline rayQuery fault identically on the AS read). An acceleration structure can equally be reached by its device address via OpConvertUToAccelerationStructureKHR, which reads no descriptor and so never touches the faulting heap path. glslang has no GLSL spelling for that conversion, so VulkanShader rewrites the compiled SPIR-V at module-load time: every `OpLoad %accelStruct <heap-ptr>` becomes a load of the TLAS device address from a synthesized push-constant block followed by the convert. RTPass pushes the active frame's TLAS address into that push constant. User GLSL and example code are unchanged; acceleration structures still bind into the heap normally. The workaround is gated on Device::workaroundDescriptorHeapAS (true only on the NVIDIA proprietary driver) and confined to one fenced block in Crafter.Graphics-ShaderVulkan.cppm plus the RTPass push and the shaderInt64 feature toggle — delete those once a fixed NVIDIA driver ships and the heap AS read becomes the direct path again. Verified: VulkanTriangle ray-traces correctly on native NVIDIA (RTX 4090), validation-layer-clean, no device loss. The SPIR-V rewrite was independently validated with spirv-val on both the VulkanTriangle and Sponza raygen modules. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| closesthit.glsl | ||
| closesthit.wgsl | ||
| main.cpp | ||
| miss.glsl | ||
| miss.wgsl | ||
| project.cpp | ||
| raygen.glsl | ||
| raygen.wgsl | ||
| README.md | ||
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
DescriptorHeapVulkansized for one image + one buffer slot, with slot ranges allocated via the bump-allocator API (AllocateImageSlots,AllocateBufferSlots). - A
PipelineRTVulkanbuilt from raygen / miss / closesthit SPIR-V shaders compiled at build time. Mesh::Buildconstructing a BLAS andRenderingElement3D::BuildTLASthe per-frame TLAS.- Direct descriptor writes via
vkWriteResourceDescriptorsEXTfor the swapchain views and TLAS device addresses. RTPass{&pipeline}plugged intowindow.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
cd examples/VulkanTriangle
crafter-build -r
You should see a 1280×720 window with an RGB-barycentric triangle filling roughly the centre. On the NVIDIA driver this works through an engine-side workaround for a driver fault — see below.
Native status — NVIDIA driver fault, worked around
On NVIDIA driver 610.43.02 (Vulkan 1.4) reading the acceleration
structure through VK_EXT_descriptor_heap aborts the device with
VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST on the first frame. This is a driver-side fault
in the brand-new descriptor-heap acceleration-structure path, not an engine
bug (full investigation in #7, summarised below).
The engine works around it transparently (issue #15). On the NVIDIA
proprietary driver only, VulkanShader rewrites the compiled SPIR-V at
module-load time so that every OpLoad of an accelerationStructureEXT
out of the heap becomes a load of the TLAS device address (from a
synthesized push-constant block) followed by
OpConvertUToAccelerationStructureKHR — which reads no descriptor and so
never touches the faulting path. RTPass feeds the active frame's TLAS
address in as push data. raygen.glsl and the example code are unchanged;
acceleration structures still bind into the heap normally. On every other
driver the workaround is inert. It's gated on
Device::workaroundDescriptorHeapAS and confined to one fenced block in
interfaces/Crafter.Graphics-ShaderVulkan.cppm so it can be deleted wholesale
once a fixed NVIDIA driver ships.
The underlying fault (#7)
The fault was 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::FinishInitdoesvkQueueWaitIdle). The built TLAS instance has an identity transform,mask = 0xFF, and the correct BLAS device address. - The AS descriptor is written correctly —
vkWriteResourceDescriptorsEXTstores 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
traceRayEXTremoved, the raygen shader'simageStorerenders 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
pAddressRangesize. VK_EXT_descriptor_heapis 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, and
it should be reported to NVIDIA. Until a fixed driver ships, the SPIR-V
rewrite above keeps the native RT path working; once it does, remove the
workaround and the heap AS read becomes the direct path again.