NVRHI
A cross-platform abstraction layer for Direct3D 11/12 and Vulkan with automatic resource management and validation.
What is NVRHI?
NVRHI is a cross-platform graphics API abstraction layer developed by NVIDIA that provides a unified interface for Direct3D 11, Direct3D 12, and Vulkan. It solves the problem of maintaining separate rendering codebases for different graphics APIs by offering automatic resource management, state tracking, and validation while maintaining direct access to underlying APIs when needed.
Graphics engineers and game developers working on cross-platform rendering engines who need to support multiple graphics APIs without rewriting their rendering code for each one.
Developers choose NVRHI because it provides a production-ready abstraction layer with minimal overhead, comprehensive validation tools, and is battle-tested in NVIDIA's own SDKs and demos, ensuring reliability and performance.
Overview
NVRHI (NVIDIA Rendering Hardware Interface) is a C++ library that provides a unified interface across multiple graphics APIs, enabling developers to write rendering code once and deploy it on Direct3D 11, Direct3D 12, and Vulkan. It simplifies low-level graphics programming by handling complex API-specific details while maintaining high performance and flexibility.
Key Features
- Automatic Resource Management — Tracks resource states, barriers, usage lifetimes, and enables deferred safe destruction.
- Efficient Resource Binding — Low-overhead binding model with direct underlying API access when needed.
- Cross-API Portability — Write rendering code once and run on supported graphics APIs.
- Advanced Pipeline Support — Handles Graphics, Compute, Ray Tracing, and Meshlet pipelines.
- Debugging Tools — Includes a validation layer and resource reflection for easier debugging.
- Parallel Rendering — Supports parallel command list recording and multi-queue rendering.
Philosophy
NVRHI aims to reduce the complexity of multi-API graphics development by providing a clean, efficient abstraction that doesn't sacrifice performance or direct control when needed.
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