Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan Driver Makes First Steps Towards Ray-Tracing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan Driver Makes First Steps Towards Ray-Tracing

There still is much work left to be completed but Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has made its first baby steps towards ray-tracing support with Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" series hardware...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-Ray-Tracing-First-Step

[schmidtbag]

Great to see movement on this so early

[peterdk]

Am wondering if the driver devs need to write the full ray tracing logic or that it's hardware calls they need to glue together? What does the hardware provide and what does Vulkan provide and what's left for the devs?

[BNieuwenhuizen]

Am wondering if the driver devs need to write the full ray tracing logic or that it's hardware calls they need to glue together? What does the hardware provide and what does Vulkan provide and what's left for the devs?

The hardware provides an instruction to instersect a ray to a single BVH node with a triangle or 4 AABB boxes. In the cases of a box node it can return the box ids sorted by hit distance. In the case of a triangle node it can provide the barycentric coordinates of the intersection.

So what we have to write is:

* The rest of the BVH structure (a lot of the extra information to glue things together , like connect multiple BVHs together or deal with intersection masks etc.)
* Building the BVH
* BVH traversal
* All the other random stuff like stack management for the recursive shader usage or the ability to separately compile shaders in the raytracing pipeline.

[mazumoto]

Yay, looking forward to trying this out. Thanks BNieuwenhuizen

[obri]

Hmm,

So NVidia is ahead of AMD in RT.

But does VKD3D also work with NVidia for RT?
And will AMD provide DLSS like tech on Linux and will this work with VKD3D?

[Awesomeness]

let us know when the gnome devs implement it....and make Gnome 'Great Again'.

Ooohh, real time window drop shadows via raytracing.

[dpanter]

Cool beans Bas, can't wait to poke around with RT.

[ix900]

Ooohh, real time window drop shadows via raytracing.

A ray traced desktop environment might be really nice. Could be all kinds of neat things that could be done. But I don't think the GPU usage would be nice lol. Who needs mining software when Linux will do the same thing for you

Wouldn't mind if someone did it only during movement and then paused it. That way idle would still be low powered and the computer would be quiet instead of fans ramped up.

[scottishduck]

Hmm,

So NVidia is ahead of AMD in RT.

But does VKD3D also work with NVidia for RT?
And will AMD provide DLSS like tech on Linux and will this work with VKD3D?

AMD doesn’t have tensor cores so it’s hard to see them making anything comparable to DLSS