Multiple Games Are Now Working With RADV's Ray-Tracing Code

Not only is Intel progressing with its open-source ray-tracing driver support but the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been rounding out its RT code too and now has multiple games correctly rendering.

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has been spearheading the RADV work on Vulkan ray-tracing support and after more than a half-year tackling it things are starting to fall into place nicely.Games such as Quake II RTX with native Vulkan ray-tracing are working along with the game control via VKD3D-Proton for going from Direct3D 12 DXR to Vulkan RT. Metro Exodus is also working while Ghostrunner and Doom Eternal are two games tested that are not yet working.

While there are these games working with RADV's ray-tracing driver support, the performance still leaves a lot to be desired with it coming in less than half the speed of the Radeon Windows driver.

Bas is hoping to begin soon upstreaming the RADV ray-tracing support and to ideally have the initial code there for Mesa 21.3 next quarter. After that improvements are still planned around pipeline compilation BVH building, and traversal. Further functionality is still needed for meeting DXR 1.1 requirements for handling more Windows games via VKD3D-Proton.

More details on this latest RADV ray-tracing milestone via Bas' blog.