Mesa allows older AMD GPUs to turn on Vulkan Ray-Tracing, Including RDNA, Navi 1x, Vega, and Polaris

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 20/30 series and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs both have dedicated optical Vulkan ray-tracing units. This type of kernel is specially designed for accelerating the boundary volume hierarchy (BVH) instructions to handle complex light collisions in graphics scenes. This kind of complex tree structure requires a lot of computing power, and the custom kernel of GPU can solve this problem with faster speed.

AMD RX 590

Image: AMD

Mesa is an open-source project for OpenGL and Vulkan AP for Linux. According to Phoronix, in the new Mesa, ray tracing may be introduced for some of AMD’s old GPUs. Developer Joshua Ashton said that the technology will be applicable to GPUs with architectures such as RDNA, Navi 1x, Vega, and Polaris. The new Vulkan RADV open-source graphics driver uses software to simulate BVH on these old GPUs, just like the RDNA 2 architecture, and has passed the CTS conformance test.

It is understood that Joshua Ashton has been testing on the old GPU for several months. In addition, some users have reported that running “Quake 2 RTX” on the Navi 10 core will encounter some errors, which are basically normal after recompilation at the bottom level, and the Steam version cannot run. Undoubtedly, compared with the hardware implementation, the software simulation method is far inferior in terms of performance and quality. Nvidia has also used a similar method to achieve similar operations on some GeForce GTX 10/16 series GPUs. Although it can run games and software that support ray tracing, the effect is much worse than that of GeForce RTX 20/30 series GPUs.

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