RADV Ray-Tracing Enabled By Default For Mesa 23.2

For some months now RADV ray-tracing has been enabled on a per-game basis while finally today in a change for next quarter's Mesa 23.2 release is RADV ray-tracing support being exposed by default for all software.

RADV ray-tracing pipelines are now enabled by default. Friedrich Vock wrote in the now-merged MR, "radv/rt: Enable ray tracing pipelines by default...At long last, it's here." This support over the course of many months has evolved into good shape for RDNA2 GPUs and newer.

The Vulkan ray-tracing support for this open-source Radeon Vulkan API driver within Mesa is now deemed good enough to enable it by default. Vulkan ray-queries performance with RADV should be competitive to AMD's official AMDVLK Vulkan driver or that of the AMD Windows drivers. RT pipelines htough are still slower than the official AMD Vulkan driver code.

More details on the current RADV Vulkan ray-tracing support via this blog post by RADV contributor Friedrich Vock.