Lavapipe CPU-Based Vulkan Driver Implements Ray-Tracing Pipelines

[Anux]

Smartphones and game consoles have RayTracing too.

Yes, but they have dedicated hardware for the RT part which is 100 to 1000 times faster than your typical CPU. If you compare the above 128 thread CPU to a 8 thread smartphone CPU (lets assume the threads are equal) its 16 times slower than the 15 FPS.

And yes the software renderers do make progress (AVX optimizations) but so do GPU drivers. I myself am a fan of efficient resource usage, so I'd like to be proven wrong. And maybe there will be an edge case in the future that profits from CPU rendering.

[Developer12]

This is totally academic and beyond the use-case of the CPU solution, but I can't help wonder how many CPU cores and/or what clockspeed they'd have to run to get GPU-levels of performance using this solution. I imagine it might be in the hundreds or thousands of cores

Having a software implementation like this is extreemely useful for doing single-frame renders when you aren't guarenteed to have a GPU. There's plenty of CAD software out there that can fall back to software openGL when nesisary.

As RT moves towards being a standard API that everyone just uses for everything these fallbacks are going to become more and more useful. I can see software in the near future making use of RT to render fancy GUI elements and weird skeuomorphs and other random stuff that isn't particularly demanding but will completely crash the application if the RT APIs aren't available.