Experimental RADV Code Allows Vulkan Ray-Tracing On Older AMD GPUs

[reba]

I vaguely remember a demo from Crytek a couple of years ago that managed a pretty impressive level of RTRT on a 5700.
* digs through history...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw

Obviously that's very much a custom system that probably doesn't map too well to the APIs nvidia defined for their HW-assisted aspects, but it's still a pretty impressive demo of how far you can get just by offloading calcs to the GPU, even without dedicated RT processing cores built into the card itself.

Wow, nice

And ye olde i7-3770 with an RX 480 from 2017 came up with 3348 points and around 40 fps on 1920x1080 and "ULTRA RT" - I don't think it's too shabby for a tech demo.

https://i.imgur.com/I92lcgQ.png

https://i.imgur.com/cidOEdu.png

I now have hope for official raytracing on older cards.

[skeevy420]

Or a reference the the old joke.

[pal666]

I thought APU's and GPU's could now access both system memory and video memory directly

but not fast

[mphuZ]

Guys, I certainly appreciate all this effort and development. But, tell me, why do I need RT on Vega and Polaris?

All the other problems have already been solved and now there is free time for this?

[akuhtr]

Guys, I certainly appreciate all this effort and development. But, tell me, why do I need RT on Vega and Polaris?

All the other problems have already been solved and now there is free time for this?

I don't want to speak for him, but I guess it is a fun? Not everythink need practical reason :-D

[smitty3268]

Guys, I certainly appreciate all this effort and development. But, tell me, why do I need RT on Vega and Polaris?

All the other problems have already been solved and now there is free time for this?

It sounds like it was mostly something fun for him to work on, and it gives him a way to test out ray-tracing apps/tests on older hardware for testing and compatibility purposes.

[linner]

Reason number 317 for why AMD with full FOSS driver stack will *always* be superior to NVDA and their monolothic binary blob. Linus and his middle finger were right.

Absolutely worth it to not have to put up with the buggy AMD stuff. I have regretted every single AMD/ATI purchase I have ever made over the last 20 years. I keep thinking, and people keep telling me, "oh, it will be different THIS time". Nope, never.