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

[schmidtbag]

I wonder how many hours per frame this would be at 1080p.

I see no reason why this shouldn't be made, but I also question if it would ever have practical use.

[user1]

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

1. How is this relevant to this topic?

2. Almost every piece of hardware since 2007 should support OpenGL 3.0. Do you think they raised the requirement for no reason? Maybe, just maybe there's some benefits to it like improved performance?
Hardware that doesn't support OGL 3.0 are basically DX9 class GPU's like the old ATi cards up to 2006. Who do you think will want to run modern Gnome on such hardware? Literally nobody.

[cb88]

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.

That's not really the issue though, CPUs run out of bandwidth really fast for either raster or RT... but a ThreadRipper may actually have enough cache to make it practical. Then there isthe fact that llvmpipe isn't really optimized for more than about 8 cores max and its already falling off pretty hard at that point because of multithreading scalability and memory bandwidth issues... so it would have to be tuned to go fast on threadripper if it would work at all, definitely not going to be fast out of the box, neither would it saturate all the cores maybe like 20% tops probably.

[byteabit]

Does AVX-512 CPU extension help here?

[ReaperX7]

Threadripper might be able to handle it, but that would require probably a 96 core 7995WX or equivalent to handle that much data throughput and I'm going to estimate it would be severely limited to probably 15 FPS at best.

1FPS isn't bad if you're taking screenshots for business related ventures like professional rendering however. It's better than "it simply just isn't available".

Now the real question is, could this be wrapped back to OpenCL to be handled by the Stream Processors with hardware acceleration, even if minimal?

[Kver]

I would be genuinely interested in seeing a CPU drag race between Threadripper, Ryzen, Intel Core, Xeon, and M2 with RT loads... Maybe even a Raspberry Pi if it can do it. Would it be practical? Absolutely not. Would it be f*king hilarious? Absolutely yes.

[Phoronos]

Guys, remember that the graphics should be done by the GPU and not the CPU.
I am personaly against those drivers which use the CPU instead of the GPU, they shouldnt even exist...and should never be used, except for testing purposes.
That's my opinion.

[s_j_newbury]

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...

I just tried it and I get 15fps on my Vega64 and overclocked FX8370E. Much better than I expected, although obviously unplayable. Resolution makes no difference.

[avis]

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.

"On June 12, 2008, Intel demonstrated a special version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, titled Quake Wars: Ray Traced, using ray tracing for rendering, running in basic HD (720p) resolution. ETQW operated at 14–29 frames per second on a 16-core (4 socket, 4 core) Xeon Tigerton system running at 2.93 GHz."

https://web.archive.org/web/20081002030022/http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37925-113.html

In 2008 CPU based real time ray tracing worked, now 16 years later it's suddenly unfeasible despite CPUs having become up to 40x faster (in MT workloads)? Are Linux users experts in everything? You are not. Could be a little bit more humble.

Path Tracing (as opposed to Ray Tracing) could be still ways away though but it's not what this news piece is about.

[byteabit]

In 2008 CPU based real time ray tracing worked, now 16 years later it's suddenly unfeasible despite CPUs having become up to 40x faster (in MT workloads)?

But that was specially adapated one specific game for one specific CPU, with one specific API. Which IS impressive for its time, not stating otherwise. The Mesa driver is generic for any game and CPU, if I understand this correctly. So any game can use the CPU to render RayTracing, even if the game does not know if its a GPU or CPU doing that, if I understand it correctly.