RADV Ray-Tracing To Become Much Faster With New Driver Code

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver ray-tracing support is about to become much faster with a pending improvement that is currently undergoing review.

Friedrich Vock has implemented support for batch acceleration structure builds within the Mesa RADV driver. He explained in the pending merge request:

"This converts radv_CmdBuildAccelerationStructuresKHR to a simple shim that pushes the actual build commands to a queue, where they are accumulated and dispatched as late as possible.

This helps especially with games that don't do any build command batching of their own. For example, it triples the performance of Hitman 3."

Yes, tripling the performance in the HITMAN 3 game.

One of the comments in testing the MR goes on to note:

"the perf uplift from this PR is huge in a few games, out of the ones I own lego builders journey gets a 2x improvement in performance. Control gets an additional ~5 fps at 1080p, Minecraft RTX (education edition) gets ~10 fps more. When paired with the monolithic pipeline MR it completely blows amdvlk out of water.

Tested on my rx6800."

The monolithic pipelines MR mentioned is here.

This code will hopefully be merged in the coming days or weeks and this much faster RADV ray-tracing support can then be enjoyed in next quarter's Mesa 23.3 release.