RADV Lands Rewritten Acceleration Structures For Ray-Tracing In Mesa 22.3

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RADV Lands Rewritten Acceleration Structures For Ray-Tracing In Mesa 22.3

Being merged into Mesa 22.3 this morning for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" are rewritten acceleration structures for the ray-tracing support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-RT-New-Accel-Structs

[mazumoto]

Hm, I guess this won't change performance much ...
I just started playing Control. Nice game so far. It's almost playable using Raytracing set to "medium" on my RX 6900XT. So I'm eagerly waiting for some performance improvements


Edit:
Just tried it ... doesn't seem to make any difference judging scientifically by looking at the HUD. Still between 20-30fps.

[Linuxxx]

Hm, I guess this won't change performance much ...
I just started playing Control. Nice game so far. It's almost playable using Raytracing set to "medium" on my RX 6900XT. So I'm eagerly waiting for some performance improvements

I already finished the main game with ray-tracing set to "high" on my nVidia RTX 3060 Ti with absolutely smooth gameplay running inside OpenBox.

Frankly, if I were to spent top dollars/euros on an AMD Radeon 6900 XT, I would expect top performance out of it...

Have you tried to play Control with AMD's closed-source AMDVLK-Pro binary driver with official support for ray-tracing by any chance?

BTW, don't get me wrong, I absolutely admire what the Mesa devs are able to pull of with RADV and benefit greatly from it on my Radeon R9 380.
It's just the lack of official contributions from AMD that I'm disappointed with...

(Not to mention the over-engineered joke that they are calling ROCm; even just the name itself is already a huge red [AMD] flag...)

[mazumoto]

Frankly, if I were to spent top dollars/euros on an AMD Radeon 6900 XT, I would expect top performance out of it...

Well ... It'd have been a 6800XT, but that wasn't available (and even more overpriced than the 6900 XT back then). I hope it never gets as bad again as 1.5 years ago with availability/prices when I just needed to replace my ageing R9 290X. When I bought it, I actually knew it wouldn't be that good in raytracing, and frankly, I don't care too much. The eye candy added is not really making the game any different. It's more playing around with technical details for me.
And of course it'd be great if AMD put more ... resources behind my chosen Linux drivers (namely RADV). But I'm content. The situation is *so much better* than on the green side - no proprietary stuff tainting my kernel, updates just work, everything is stable and fast enough - and that some such thing as RADV is even able to exists is great.

Have you tried to play Control with AMD's closed-source AMDVLK-Pro binary driver with official support for ray-tracing by any chance?

Nope, I don't go near the closed-source stuff. Too much effort, too much that can go wrong.

BTW, don't get me wrong, I absolutely admire what the Mesa devs are able to pull of with RADV and benefit greatly from it on my Radeon R9 380.
It's just the lack of official contributions from AMD that I'm disappointed with...

Well ... I'd wish that they used and funded a mesa vulkan driver from the beginning. But they didn't and it took them too long to release the open-source AMDVLK thingy. Now ... I'm quite happy that this lead to Dave Airlie's and Bas Nieuwenhuizen's (and others?) RADV driver. It seems to be a clean, well architected driver. That Valve (and others?) are now really picking it up and making/keeping it great is really fortunate. So Valve / Steam is where my money goes for games And AMD gets it on the hardware side - they're far from perfect (coreboot, fsp, ...), but there is no better option currently that works for me.

[dlq84]

Hm, I guess this won't change performance much ...
I just started playing Control. Nice game so far. It's almost playable using Raytracing set to "medium" on my RX 6900XT. So I'm eagerly waiting for some performance improvements


Edit:
Just tried it ... doesn't seem to make any difference judging scientifically by looking at the HUD. Still between 20-30fps.

RX 6000 just suck att RT (even on windows), it's like AMD just added it last minute because they didn't want to lack a feature Nvidia had.

I'm confident RX 7000 will be much better in this regard, though.

[V1tol]

The situation is *so much better* than on the green side - no proprietary stuff tainting my kernel, updates just work, everything is stable and fast enough - and that some such thing as RADV is even able to exists is great.

Exactly my feelings. It was like a breath of fresh air when I ditched RTX2060 in favor of RX6800XT.

[shmerl]

I'm waiting for this to be merged: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/danie...v_rt_functions

This should probably help ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077.

[finalzone]

RX 6000 just suck att RT (even on windows), it's like AMD just added it last minute because they didn't want to lack a feature Nvidia had.

I'm confident RX 7000 will be much better in this regard, though.

Let remind RX 6000 series is the first generation hardware implementing ray-tracing much like Nvidia RTX 2000 series. Expecting Radeon RX 6000 series to have higher performance on that part as first iteration is plain unrealistic.

[smitty3268]

Edit:
Just tried it ... doesn't seem to make any difference judging scientifically by looking at the HUD. Still between 20-30fps.

This wasn't expected to change performance, just help with debugging.

Hopefully it helps them land https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...requests/15030, which should provide a big performance boost. Looks like even after that they'll still have a ways to go before matching the proprietary driver.

[Anux]

Let remind RX 6000 series is the first generation hardware implementing ray-tracing much like Nvidia RTX 2000 series. Expecting Radeon RX 6000 series to have higher performance on that part as first iteration is plain unrealistic.

Also most ray traced games are written and optimized on Nvidia hardware and AMD couldn't just copy the Nvidia hardware, so unless games are actually developed on AMDs ray tracing technology they will always lack behind.