Upcoming AMD RADV “Radeon Vulkan” Drivers To Bring Up To 3x Ray Tracing Performance Boost

The MESA Radeon Vulkan drivers "RADV" for AMD GPUs are expected to feature huge ray tracing performance upgrades in the coming release, with up to 3x the gains in some titles.

Linux Users Should Hang Tight Since AMD GPUs Will Now Deliver Exceptional Ray-Tracing Experience With Upcoming RADV "Radeon Vulkan" Drivers

The upcoming AMD Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" on Linux is expected to elevate ray-tracing to new heights. The driver is currently in its "review" stages, but the platform's expert Friedrich Vock has some words on the new update, disclosing the huge performance uplift:

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.

Fredrich Vock

While we don't have actual data on the performance improvements but based on the statement we can say that it is surely a huge one. Moreover, MESA engineer Etaash Mathamsetty has apparently tested the new driver code, implying that he saw a 2x ray tracing performance jump in Lego Builders Journey.

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.

Tested on my rx6800.

Etaash Mathamsetty

Similarly, Hitman III is another title where the AMD RADV "Radeon Vulkan" drivers deliver a massive boost, almost providing a 3x gain over the existing driver. We are certainly looking forward to what the new drivers bring, and we will share the benchmarks with you once they are obtained. Meanwhile, the merge request can be reviewed here.

Phoronix believes that the revamped RADV ray tracing is expected to merge in the upcoming days, with its release in Mesa 23.3 quarterly update. The MESA team is giving it all here, and by the looks, it seems like the company has diverted its focus towards Linux since we have often seen new patches hinting towards next-gen support such as the RDNA 4 GPUs.

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