RADV's Vulkan Ray-Tracing LBVH Extended Back To All GCN GPUs

[remenic]

True possible use cases, however if you are really trying to use it this way your either on the top end card or close to it already... ray tracing in these edge cases is bearly supported even on the newer hardware.

Isn't this more of a side effect of the implementation rather than a goal they were trying to achieve? I too doubt it will be useful, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's just a "bonus" of this implementation.

[V1tol]

But AMD on its official drivers for Windows only allows for Ray Tracing on RDNA 2. So not even RDNA 1, and forget about any previous generation.

Well, it will be awkward when VKD3D implements DXR on GPUs that don't support it on crapdows

What you see here is not AMD, but the power of Open Source drivers.

Silly question. Where is opensource NVIDIA driver then?

[WannaBeOCer]

If game developers used Voxel based ray tracing we could use practically any DX 11/Vulkan supported GPU and not rely heavily on BVH dedicated hardware like Nvidia's RT cores/AMD's RA cores.

GTX 480: https://imgur.com/g3e2MT5
HD 5850: https://imgur.com/egXONRX
HD 6970: https://imgur.com/vfWGm12

GTX 480 Stock @ 700/1401/924 using driver 391.35
HD 5850 Stock @ 775/1125 using driver 16.2.1
HD 6970 Stock @ 880/1375 using driver 16.2.1

Seems like gamers now a days don't care about graphics since they keep pushing FSR so we might as well switch to using Voxel based engines.

[shmerl]

Still no raytracing in Cyberpunk 2077, but I'll keep testing it

[Teggs]

Some poor dev is going to be scratching their head if they get an automated bug report for an HD 7870 in their RT-only game.

[tajjada]

IMO the target audience that can benefit the most from this are developers.

Yes, these old cards are too slow for most practical use cases for raytracing by end users (like playing the various released games/titles that use raytracing).

However, guess what they are not too slow for? Someone learning graphics programming and wanting to learn / experiment with new raytracing APIs. Or an indie game dev trying to get some experience with the new tech.

Especially with the shortage of latest-gen GPUs, there have been a lot of developers who only have older hardware.

Random indie devs are probably not working on a big project that requires a ton of performance. Having access to the new raytracing functionality means they can learn how to work with it, enabling them to use modern technology that would be completely inaccessible otherwise.

If you are a developer and you want to learn how to work with raytracing, you need to be able to run your code! And you don't need performance, you just need it to work so you can see it does the right thing. Now you can do it even if you have an old GPU.

[Developer12]

Silly question. Where is opensource NVIDIA driver then?

Nvidia blocked it with signed firmware.

You need firmware to raise the card's clock speed above the abysmally slow boot speed. Nvidia made it so the cards only accept firmware signed by nvidia. Nvidia don't release signed firmware that works with the open source drivers.

Thus, the only thing the open source drivers are good enough for, is installing ndivia's closed-source drivers.

[d3coder]

NVIDIA: No, you can raytrace only on 2xxx and 3xxx series
AMD: Hey, need some rays for your 7770 from 2012?

Whoa, where can I download open source AMD driver that is made by AMD that supports ray tracing? I only see Valve and RedHat driver

[arQon]

True possible use cases, however if you are really trying to use it this way your either on the top end card or close to it already... ray tracing in these edge cases is bearly supported even on the newer hardware.

Yeah, per-follicle shadow casting on the fur absolutely kills performance. :P