Intel's Open-Source Vulkan Driver Moves Closer To Working Ray-Tracing Support

Going back to late 2020 there has been bits of Intel Vulkan ray-tracing preparations landing within their Mesa "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver in anticipation of Xe HPG with hardware ray-tracing capabilities.

Over the past nearly two years they have landed more changes -- including the recent "~100x" performance fix for RT. It looks like the Intel Vulkan ray-tracing for Linux could soon cross the finish line for mainline Mesa support.

This merge request was merged on Friday into Mesa 22.3-devel. That MR is a subset of the patches from MR 16970: "anv: Initial ray-tracing support." That ANV ray-tracing MR still has some patches remaining but once all are applied, around half of the Vulkan CTS test cases for ray-tracing are passing with the other half being not supported by the hardware while no test failures.

ASRock China recently announced their first Arc Graphics offering in the form of an A380 mini-ITX, single-slot card.

Friday's merged code has fixes, adding BVH data structures to the genxml handler, and other ray-tracing related work, some of which patches date back one to two years.

So it's looking like the Intel Vulkan ray-tracing support on Linux could soon be buttoned up for Intel's Arc Graphics "Alchemist" cards on Linux. But with this remaining work not coming until Mesa 22.3, which won't be released as stable until late November or early December. At least for non-RT Vulkan use, it would appear Mesa 22.2 is largely in good shape for the initial Intel desktop graphics cards when paired with Linux 6.0+ and force-enabling the support.