GeForce RTX 30 vs. AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Vulkan Ray-Tracing On Linux

Besides the Vulkan Linux drivers lacking when it comes to ray-tracing support, there also aren't many games/software yet using the extensions on Linux. There are a few benchmarks/demos and then Quake II RTX. Valve with VKD3D-Proton has been working on DirectX Ray-Tracing mapped to Vulkan ray-tracing and they are making good progress there at least when it comes to the NVIDIA driver, but still only some RT games work and not yet any that work for our automated benchmark requirements.

With GeeXLab's Vulkan ray-tracing demo, the AMD RDNA2 performance was quite good compared to NVIDIA's RTX 30 series and roughly in line with expectations.

On a performance-per-Watt basis, the tested RDNA2 graphics cards for this benchmark were out ahead of the NVIDIA Ampere graphics cards.

But when getting to Quake II RTX with its latest Steam build, the performance on AMD graphics cards is still very much subpar. But then again, NVIDIA did the ray-tracing work on Quake II RTX.