There's Finally A Decent Vulkan Ray-Tracing Benchmark

While so far only the NVIDIA proprietary driver on Linux supports the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions, eventually we will see support for these new Vulkan extensions with the AMD Vulkan drivers for the Radeon RX 6000 series and newer. There has also been work by Intel in preparing for Vulkan ray-tracing with Xe HPG. For when the time comes to test those implementations, there is finally one good, open-source, automated Vulkan RT benchmark so far.

Developer Tanguy Fautre has been working on "RayTracingInVulkan" as some basic Vulkan ray-tracing tests originally for NVIDIA's RTX Vulkan extensions and now working for the Vulkan KHR ray-tracing support. RayTracingInVulkan was pointed out to me a few days ago and is hosted at GitHub.

Besides being open-source, RayTracingInVulkan is automated test friendly and has fit the requirements for my purposes -- so I added it to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org.




NVIDIA RTX hardware pays off (obviously) for the Vulkan ray-tracing work.

More of the benchmark results collected so far and other tests on RayTracingInVulkan as a benchmark can be found via the OpenBenchmarking.org test page. Once the AMD Vulkan Linux drivers begin supporting the Vulkan RT extensions as well as Xe HPG surfacing with its ray-tracing support it will make for some fun benchmarking. Hopefully by then we see greater benchmark-friendly Vulkan ray-tracing exposure on Linux too. Those with a supported graphics card today can run phoronix-test-suite benchmark rtiv to see how your performance compares.