The MESA Radeon Vulkan drivers "RADV" for AMD GPUs are expected to feature huge ray tracing performance upgrades in the coming release, with up to 3x the gains in some titles.
Linux Users Should Hang Tight Since AMD GPUs Will Now Deliver Exceptional Ray-Tracing Experience With Upcoming RADV "Radeon Vulkan" Drivers
The upcoming AMD Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" on Linux is expected to elevate ray-tracing to new heights. The driver is currently in its "review" stages, but the platform's expert Friedrich Vock has some words on the new update, disclosing the huge performance uplift:
This converts radv_CmdBuildAccelerationStructuresKHR to a simple shim that pushes the actual build commands to a queue, where they are accumulated and dispatched as late as possible.
This helps especially with games that don't do any build command batching of their own. For example, it triples the performance of Hitman 3.
Fredrich Vock
While we don't have actual data on the performance improvements but based on the statement we can say that it is surely a huge one. Moreover, MESA engineer
the perf uplift from this PR is huge in a few games, out of the ones I own lego builders journey gets a 2x improvement in performance. Control gets an additional ~5 fps at 1080p, Minecraft RTX (education edition) gets ~10 fps more. When paired with the monolithic pipeline MR it completely blows amdvlk out of water.
Tested on my rx6800.
Etaash Mathamsetty
Phoronix believes that the revamped RADV ray tracing is expected to merge in the upcoming days, with its release in Mesa 23.3 quarterly update. The MESA team is giving it all here, and by the looks, it seems like the company has diverted its focus towards Linux since we have often seen new patches hinting towards next-gen support such as the RDNA 4 GPUs.
News Source: Phoronix
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
