AMD graphics card’s ray tracing performance in Linux games has been greatly improved

The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver, RADV, crafted specifically for AMD graphics cards, is poised to witness a substantial enhancement in ray tracing performance in its forthcoming iteration. As delineated by Wccftech and Phoronix, some games are even experiencing a tripling in performance.

Developer Friedrich Vock has seamlessly integrated support for batch acceleration structure construction within the driver code. In his merge request, he elucidates, “This converts radv_CmdBuildAccelerationStructuresKHR to a simple shim that pushes the actual build commands to a queue, where they are accumulated and dispatched as late as possible.

This helps especially with games that don’t do any build command batching of their own. For example, it triples the performance of Hitman 3.“

Another adept, Etaash Mathamsetty, having subjected these nascent codes to rigorous tests using the RX 6800, remarked, “the perf uplift from this PR is huge in a few games, out of the ones I own lego builders journey gets a 2x improvement in performance. Control gets an additional ~5 fps at 1080p, Minecraft RTX (education edition) gets ~10 fps more. When paired with the monolithic pipeline MR it completely blows amdvlk out of water.”

As prognosticated by Phoronix, these codes are anticipated to merge in the impending days or possibly weeks. Enthusiasts can relish swifter RADV ray tracing support in Mesa’s 23.3 version slated for the subsequent quarter. It’s worth noting that the Linux handheld, Steam Deck, also employs Mesa as its driver.