New RADV Patches Reportedly Bring Significant Ray Tracing Performance Boost For RDNA 4 and RDNA 3 GPUs; Quake II RTX Reportedly Sees 14% Higher Performance

Jul 18, 2025 at 09:53am EDT
Graphics card enhances Quake II RTX visuals by 14% with ray tracing enabled.

With the newer patches for the Radeon RADV, both Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 series GPUs will see improvement in Ray Tracing performance in games.

Radeon Vulkan Driver Gets Patches Ahead of Mesa 25.2 Code Freeze to Bring Solid Ray Tracing Improvements in Current and Previous-Gen Radeon Graphics Cards

Not just ancient Radeon GPUs, but Linux open-source developers are also continuously working to deliver patches required for performance enhancements across the latest GPUs. The new patches added to the Mesa 3D Graphics Library will now bring improvements for the RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs, as reported by Phoronix. These patches are related to the RADV (Radeon Vulkan Driver) and have been merged into Mesa's Git repository.

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The Valve contractor, Natalie Vock, delivered newer optimizations ahead of the Mesa 25.2 Code Freeze, which will improve the Ray Tracing performance of these GPUs. The patches mention GFX11 and GFX12 IDs, which correspond to the Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA 3) and Radeon RX 9000 (RDNA 4)series GPUs, and as per the notes, both GPU series should see better Ray Tracing performance in games.

As per the internal testing, the Radeon RX 9000 series was able to deliver a 14% performance boost in Quake II RTX, and we could see similar results in different titles. These improvements will reportedly work for both the GPU series, further closing the gap between the NVIDIA and AMD GPUs on Linux operating systems.

The new patch contains special GPU instructions such as ds_bvh_stack_rtn for the RDNA 3 and ds_bvh_stack_push8_pop1_rtn for the RDNA 4 series. These low-level hardware instructions handle ray tracing and will optimize how BVHs are traversed on the GPU. With such improvements, we will see reduced memory operations and hence, better efficiency.

Phoronix has previously demonstrated the improvements in Ray Tracing performance with the Radeon RX 9070 with Mesa 25.2. With newer patches, one should expect even more improvements with the RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs.

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