Mesa's Radeon Vulkan Driver Lands Indirect Ray-Tracing Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's Radeon Vulkan Driver Lands Indirect Ray-Tracing Support

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues working on maturing its ray-tracing implementation after the initial code was merged last year. RADV ray-tracing is still treated as experimental and not as reliable as the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver's ray-tracing support that has been around much longer, but it's getting there and at least is open-source -- unlike AMD's official AMDVLK driver that continues to not support Vulkan RT unlike their proprietary driver alternative...

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

[doomie]

huh, so the rt driver scene must be awfully legally encumbered?

[dlq84]

huh, so the rt driver scene must be awfully legally encumbered?

How did you arrive at that conclusion?

[smitty3268]

How did you arrive at that conclusion?

It's supposition, but in my opinion it's pretty clearly the reason AMD hasn't open sourced support. 6 months ago you could plausibly come up with a few different possibilities, but at this point patents are pretty much the only remaining option that makes sense. I imagine they must be using some patented software techniques to optimize speed.

Which isn't to say that AMD couldn't work around whatever legal issues they are running into if they cared, but I don't think they have any inclination to put in the effort. The whole point of their vulkan driver is to have it match their closed source code, so they don't want to have to change ray-tracing for linux and then have to maintain something different.

[doomie]

It's supposition, but...

exactly what he said. they officially develop both drivers. elementary, my dear watson...