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

[phoronix]

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

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver is in the unique position of supporting Vulkan ray-tracing for older AMD GPUs rather than just the latest-generation RDNA2 GPUs with dedicated ray-tracing cores. Though it's slower on these older GPUs, the code is in place for this open-source driver and the latest addition is now supporting LBVH going back to AMD GFX6 hardware -- in other words, all GCN GPUs...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-LBVH-GFX6-And-Newer

[V1tol]

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

[user1]

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

Nvidia has also enabled RT on 1000 series GPU's.

[Hibbelharry]

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

You forgot to mention the last player in the game:
AMD: We guarantee you will be able to and use RT in intel GPU speed!

[JacekJagosz]

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

It would be awesome if that would be true. 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. What you see here is not AMD, but the power of Open Source drivers. Where developers implement features that companies don't bother to do.

[piotrj3]

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

fundamentally false. Nvidia allows raytracing on older cards (with abyssmal performance on 10xx gpus as well, maybe Maxwell as well (that not sure)).

[kiffmet]

Isn't it Valve who made this possible for the AMD opensource driver? IIRC they do contribute to it by quite a lot.

[zexelon]

Yet another technically cool open source success... that serves no purpose as its unusable by any typical use case.

But hey if thats how you want to spend your dev hrs, go for it!

[billyswong]

Yet another technically cool open source success... that serves no purpose as its unusable by any typical use case.

But hey if thats how you want to spend your dev hrs, go for it!

One use case I can think of is taking cinematic screenshot or recording of gameplay. Another use case is using the real time 3d graphic engine for offline rendering. Both are relatively niche but I wouldn't say they are completely useless.

[zexelon]

One use case I can think of is taking cinematic screenshot or recording of gameplay. Another use case is using the real time 3d graphic engine for offline rendering. Both are relatively niche but I wouldn't say they are completely useless.

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.