Mesa's Radeon Vulkan Driver Has Become Much More Capable At Ray-Tracing, Thanks To Valve

Mesa’s Radeon Vulkan Driver Has Become Much More Capable At Ray-Tracing, Thanks To Valve

18 October 2023

in XDC

Reading Time: 2 mins read

Friedrich Vock with Valve presented yesterday at XDC 2023 on the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver’s ray-tracing performance. Last year at XDC 2022 it was dubbed “the world’s slowest raytracer” but thanks to the work done by Valve and others, the RADV ray-tracing performance is now quite capable and also enabled by default since Mesa 23.2. The RADV ray-tracing performance also continues inching closer to the AMDVLK Vulkan performance for that official open-source AMD Vulkan driver.

Thanks to Valve using the Mesa RADV driver for the Steam Deck, many improvements and other resources have been devoted to the Vulkan ray-tracing performance over the past year. Vock’s XDC 2023 presentation focused on all the technical improvements made to the RADV open-source driver over the past year and how it’s now much more capable.

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Last year RADV RT worked with a handful of games while now in recent months it’s reached the point that users/gamers can largely expect new titles to “just work” with this ray-tracing code path. There are some known issues still like Cyberpunk 2077 and Witcher 3 potentially hanging, but the situation is very different from a year ago.

The performance of RADV ray-tracing also continues to improve though overall hasn’t yet surpassed AMD’s official Vulkan driver performance.

Vock shared that some of the efforts still being pursued by Valve for RADV ray-tracing are getting remaining game titles working, performance optimizations, making use of more RDNA3 features, building higher quality BVHs, and other work mostly in the area of performance.