Mesa's CPU-Based Vulkan Driver Now Supports Ray-Tracing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa's CPU-Based Vulkan Driver Now Supports Ray-Tracing

The performance is likely to be atrocious, but the Mesa Lavapipe driver implementing the Vulkan API for CPU-based execution has rolled out support for Vulkan ray-tracing...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Lavapipe-Vulkan-RayTracing

[avis]

Threadripper could probably run this at decent framerates I suppose.

I mean the original Crysis works fine in software mode and that was unthinkable when it was just released.

[jeisom]

Threadripper could probably run this at decent framerates I suppose.

I mean the original Crysis works fine in software mode and that was unthinkable when it was just released.

That could be fun to compare a 96 core(not sure how well it scales) threadripper/epic to a RADV emulated raytraced card to the lowest supported hw raytraced card in QT2RTX and Portal RTX.

[TemplarGR]

Honestly, i get the feeling that the cpu based ray tracing performance isn't going to be THAT bad on systems with many fast cores. Of course it won't be that effective to play games on our mainstream desktops but still....

[M.Bahr]

Threadripper could probably run this at decent framerates I suppose.

I mean the original Crysis works fine in software mode and that was unthinkable when it was just released.

Rasterization needs way less compute power than ray tracing. This is why the former has been favoured in early GPUs. Threadripper doesn't have the needed ray tracing hardware to do heavy RT lifts here. But i think that AMD's microblaze, spartan or other AMD CPUs with an fpga component could be programmed to accelerate ray tracing.

[geerge]

Could intel's AMX instructions accelerate ray tracing? I have no idea, it just vaguely sounds like it could being essentially a matrix mult engine. Might be one of the few areas xeon can reasonably compete in the next few years.

[cend]

I sort of feel this is implemented for the sake of completeness...

[Mathias]

Rasterization needs way less compute power than ray tracing. This is why the former has been favoured in early GPUs. Threadripper doesn't have the needed ray tracing hardware to do heavy RT lifts here. But i think that AMD's microblaze, spartan or other AMD CPUs with an fpga component could be programmed to accelerate ray tracing.

I tried Q2RTX on my RX5700 without RT Hardware with emulate-rt. IIRC I get 1080p@60fps but I think some upscaling was at work...

[Anux]

As we can see in many benchmarks on phoronix AVX* is a perfect fit for ray tracing (a ray is a vector). But even a 96 core CPU is much to slow for real time RT.

[fulalas]

In the meantime GNOME can't handle simple window animations when OpenGL 3.0 is not present