Mesa 22.1 Radeon Vulkan Driver Lands Ray Primitive Culling

Over the past month we have seen more open-source Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing support build up inside Mesa 22.1 with KHR_ray_query support merged, missing stubs that at least allow Doom Eternal to get further along with its ray-tracing code path, and now there is ray primitive culling that has landed.

Open-source developer Konstantin Seurer who has worked on some of the other RADV ray-tracing improvements recently tackled ray primitive culling, which is important for efficiency/performance with Vulkan ray-tracing.

This merge request was submitted and merged this weekend into Mesa 22.1. The MR gets ray traversal primitive culling fully implemented and exposed as another step forward for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver that is widely used by Linux gamers.

The open-source driver support for RDNA2 / Radeon RX 6000 series continues to evolve quite nicely on Linux.

There still is a bit more time left before the Mesa 22.1 feature freeze and its stable release that will likely be out by the end of May, so we'll see what more lands for RADV in time and just how viable the Vulkan ray-tracing will be for this next quarterly feature release.