The open-source Mesa3D RADV Radeon Vulkan driver team says it is working on improving the ray-tracing performance of AMD GPUs.
Google’s Bas Nieuwenhuizen, who co-founded the RADV driver, previously released the source code on day one of the X.Org developer conference (also known as XDC 2022) and gave a demo of the Mesa Vulkan driver’s ray tracing performance.
In his demo at XDC 2022, he explained the process of ray tracing, how to handle the graphics acceleration of AMD Radeon RDNA 2 graphics cards, the challenges the team encountered during the implementation, and how the software optimizations for older AMD GPUs were implemented.
The RADV driver is currently the preferred choice for users of Linux AMD graphics cards and is constantly updated and regularly improved to optimize all aspects of performance.
Unlike AMD’s proprietary AMDVLK, which uses the Mesa Project’s RADV driver, each Linux distribution channel is clearly aware of the changes.
Games that the RADV co-founders have ensured are compatible with ray tracing on RADV include Control, Death Loop, Metro: The Departed Enhanced Edition, Thor’s Hammer 2 RTX, and Resident Evil Village.
Another topic related to RADV is the performance comparison of AMDVLK ray tracing support and the performance comparison of AMDGPU-PRO proprietary drivers. RADV still performs mediocre when using ray tracing, but developers are using experimental techniques to improve performance.
AMD updated the AMDVLK code as part of its official Linux update, based on the same source code used in the Windows and Linux proprietary Vulkan drivers. In addition, a major challenge with this driver is that there are still missing parts of the LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler used on the proprietary shaders.
The RADV support currently under development will include separate shader compilation and default ray tracing support, and an indirect BHV build will also bring allowable DirectX ray tracing (DXR 1.1) support, as well as further performance optimizations and enhancements.
