The improved RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver

Older AMD AIBs run software ray tracing even better.

October 31, 2022

Jon Peddie

Last year, the open-source graphics library Mesa (the open-source implementations of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, and OpenCL) added Vulkan ray-tracing capabilities to older AMD GPUs (RDNA 1, Navi, Vega, and Polaris) with the RADV driver. It accomplished that by removing the AMD bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) hardware intersection instructions. This year, the RADV ray-tracing performance has improved even more. Pending a merge request providing a parallel locally-ordered clustering (PLOC), the BVH builder improves the Quake II performance by around 33%. Friedrich Vock and Bas Nieuwenhuizen, who developed the software ray-tracing capability using AMD AIBs, have been working on the PLOC

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The improved RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver

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