Intel’s Linux GPU driver developers have released an update that could dramatically boost ray tracing performance by “100x.
Phoronix reports that Intel Linux graphics driver engineer Lionel Landwerlin merged a patch into the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver on Thursday, writing in his commit description that it “improves performance by something like 100x (no kidding). “
Intel has been working to support ray tracing with the Vulkan driver since late 2020, and according to Phoronix, the patch fixes a bug that previously caused the Vulkan driver to move ray tracing data to slower off-board system memory and back instead of using the video memory on the card due to a missing line of code.
Intel added a flag called “ANV_BO_ALLOC_LOCAL_MEM” to the patch that ensures ray tracing uses VRAM, resulting in a 100x performance boost.
Mesa 22.2, which includes the new patch, is expected to be available to users by the end of August, and it’s a good thing Intel’s own Razzle Done is not widely available, otherwise the data would be very difficult to see when tested.
