RADV PLOC BVH Builder Merged For Faster Radeon Vulkan Ray-Tracing

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been enjoying many performance optimizations and other improvements in recent months around its ray-tracing capabilities. Merged today is another significant optimization to better the Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing support and coming days ahead of AMD's RDNA3 announcement.

Last week I wrote about a new merge request for the PLOC BVH builder and that is the code now merged in time for Mesa 22.3. While "PLOC BVH builder" may not sound it exciting, for gamers it can mean significant performance improvements for Vulkan RT performance -- like Quake II RTX being around 33% faster on a Radeon RX 6700 XT.

Friedrich Vock and Bas Nieuwenhuizen hashed out this Parallel Locally-Ordered Clustering (PLOC) support for building bounding volume hierarchy nodes (BVHs). This work was partially inspired by AMD's open-source "GPURT" ray-tracing library. Quake II RTX should perform dramatically better with this now-merged code as well as various NVIDIA Vulkan demos. But titles like the game Control only saw a few FPS improvements.

With Mesa 22.3 expected to be branched in the coming days, I'll have up new Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan driver benchmarks on Phoronix shortly thereafter for seeing the gains over last quarter's 22.2 stable series. After Mesa 22.3 is branched and feature-frozen, the stable release will be out a few weeks after that point with these RADV Vulkan improvements and an assortment of other enhancements I've been writing about the past three months.