AMD Boosts Radeon Vulkan “RADV” Ray Tracing Performance With PLOC BVH Builder, 33% Improvement In Quake II RTX

We have seen improvements and bug fixes attached to the Radeon Vulkan “RADV” driver within the Mesa3D platform on the Linux front for several months now, improving ray tracing games such as Metro Exodus: Extended Edition, Deathloop, Resident Evil Village, Control, and the recent RTX update to the classic game, Quake II. Now, AMD is introducing a Parallel Locally-Ordered Clustering to support building bounding volume hierarchy nodes, or PLOC BVH, in the form of a builder to enhance the RTX capabilities of Quake II’s recent performance.

The new PLOC BVH builder recently requested to merge by Friedrich Vock yesterday, in collaboration with Bas Nieuwnhuizen, into the Radeon Vulkan driver for Quake II (RTX version) will enhance the graphical performance by as much as 33%. The PLOC BVH builder incorporates an in-shader global synchronization and a task partitioning algorithm similar in structure to the GPU ray-tracing project, or GPURT for short. AMD’s open-source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, received enablement from the GPURT project to serve as another option to the RADV in the Mesa Project.

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Last month, Nieuwenhuizen presented at the X.org Developers Conference (XDC 2022) about ray-tracing basics and discussed AMD and the company’s Radeon RDNA 2 GPUs that utilize the ray-tracing capabilities. One discussed topic was the team’s difficulties implementing ray-tracing in older AMD GPU generations. For those interested in the presentation, you can check out the recorded sessions on Youtube through this link.

Vock added in the merge request that his “benchmarking on a 6700XT indicates a 33% uplift for Q2RTX and the nvpro demos. Control suffers a bit from the increased build times, but still gets a tiny bit better (around 47 -> 51 FPS).”

It appears that the build time takes a slight hit, but it also sounds like progress is being made to not only AMD with their Radeon Vulkan ray-tracing but also benefit NVIDIA with their Vulkan ray-tracing as well.

Michael Larabel of the website Phoronix mentions that AMD has added several hundred lines of new code in this new merge request before the window closes on adding features to Mesa 22.3 in the first part of next month.

News Sources: Phoronix, XDC 2022 on YouTube, Mesa 22.3 on GitLab