Intel Open-Source Vulkan Linux Driver Now Exposes Ray-Tracing For Arc Graphics

Ahead of the flagship Arc Graphics A770 launching on 12 October, Intel's Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver has finally exposed the ray-tracing support for DG2/Alchemist graphics hardware.

Going back over two years Intel's open-source driver engineers have been working towards Vulkan ray-tracing in preparation for DG2/Alchemist. They have made many improvements and changes to their Mesa ANV driver over this time in aiming to offer good support for ray-tracing with Arc Graphics. Finally now and just ahead of the October launch, it's good enough to be exposed by default.

For the past three months has been this merge request around the ANV ray-tracing support and overnight it finally landed for Mesa 22.3. This merge request goes ahead and advertises ray-tracing suport, implements VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and a lot of other remaining bits to get Vulkan ray-tracing ready to go for Intel Arc Graphics on Linux.

All of this new Intel ANV code will be found in Mesa 22.3 due to be released around the end of November or (more than likely) December.

For those hoping to pickup an Intel A770 in October, be prepared to run Mesa Git. As I outlined in my Arc Graphics A380 Linux testing, Linux users with Arc Graphics will need at least Linux 6.0 (and even with v6.0 to be using the i915.force_probe= option to actually have the support), Mesa 22.2 or newer but now with features like RT will want to be on Mesa 22.3-devel, and linux-firmware.git as the main version requirements. By the spring distributions with the likes of Ubuntu 23.04 should be out-of-the-box support for DG2/Alchemist while for now early customers will need to be running a rather bleeding edge software stack.