Open-Source Radeon Vulkan Driver Ray-Tracing Gets A Bit Further Along For Doom Eternal

While last year saw initial Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing merged into Mesa's "RADV" driver, the work remains experimental but bit by bit is becoming more mature and capable.

Earlier this month RADV added KHR_ray_query support among other work on improving the RADV ray-tracing capabilities. Hitting Mesa 22.1-devel today were two more patches that at least can get the Doom Eternal game running under Steam Play a bit further along when ray-tracing is enabled.

Today's commits aren't implementing some shiny new features but rather just adding some missing stubs. Some Vulkan ray-tracing entry points were missing for unsupported features with the ray-tracing pipeline and acceleration structure code. So while stubbing out some unimplemented features, it's enough to help at least getting Doom Eternal a bit "further along" albeit still not yet up to the usable standards expected by gamers.

See this merge for more details on this additional small step forward for RADV RT.

The Doom Eternal game was released back in 2020 for Windows and was upgraded last year with ray-tracing capabilities. While RADV RT support is still maturing, ProtonDB rates Doom Eternal overall as a "gold" for this Windows game on Linux with Steam Play.