Mesa's Radeon Vulkan Driver Now Advertises Support For Quake II RTX & DOOM Eternal

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been working with the Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal games for a while now and recently the performance has also picked up nicely as shown in recent benchmarks. But for the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions to be exposed has required setting the RADV_PERFTEST=rt environment variable, but that has now changed initially for those two games.

As one of the last commits to the Mesa codebase for 2022, the RADV driver in Mesa 23.0 is prepared to advertise support for Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal where that ray-tracing environment variable option is no longer needed. For now the Vulkan ray-tracing isn't being unconditionally enabled but just selective white-listing with the initial games of Quake II RTX and then DOOM Eternal with the latter game running on Linux by way of Steam Play (Proton). In particular, the VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline extension is what's being exposed.

This merge request advertises ray-tracing pipelines for the two games so at least there you can launch the games straight-away without having to remember to use RADV_PERFTEST=rt. In that merge, Bas Nieuwenhuizen commented as for why the support isn't being unconditionally flipped on yet:

"Because it is not ready, in particular we're missing Daniel's shader calling work and some more game debugging.

However, it feels worth it to start enabling some games we know to work, so that people can start playing."

The merge adds the new "radv_rt" DriConf option so moving forward it's easy for other ray-traced games leveraging VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline to whitelist the support based on application name via the DriConf XML.