Mesa's Radeon Vulkan Driver Lands Indirect Ray-Tracing Support

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues working on maturing its ray-tracing implementation after the initial code was merged last year. RADV ray-tracing is still treated as experimental and not as reliable as the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver's ray-tracing support that has been around much longer, but it's getting there and at least is open-source -- unlike AMD's official AMDVLK driver that continues to not support Vulkan RT unlike their proprietary driver alternative.

The latest RADV ray-tracing work to report on is indirect ray-tracing was merged last week to Mesa 22.2-devel. RADV contributor Konstantin Seurer worked on the indirect ray-tracing support and opened up the merge request a month ago. After review and changes, the code was merged last week with "rayTracingPipelineTraceRaysIndirect" now flipped on for advertising Vulkan indirect ray-tracing support. This allows indirect ray-tracing commands like vkCmdTraceRaysIndirectKHR to be used by Vulkan games/applications.

Just about 100 lines of new code were needed on top of the existing RADV RT code. See this merge request for more details. Mesa 22.2 with this feature and a lot of other open-source Linux graphics driver improvements should be out in August.