Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Driver Can Now Handle Cyberpunk 2077 Ray-Tracing

Merged on Thursday to Mesa 23.1 was implementing VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles using hashed stages with support for caching and replay. What makes this work notable is that it in turn allows the popular game Cyberpunk 2077 running with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton on Linux to begin enjoying ray-tracing support.

RADV co-leader Bas Nieuwenhuizen implemented this VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles support. VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles was introduced in Vulkan 1.3.240 back in January and intended to help with DirectX 12 Ray-Tracing (DXR) compatibility atop the Vulkan API such as for use by Valve's VKD3D-Proton.

With RADV implementing VK_EXT_pipeline_library_group_handles, he marked off this bug ticket as closed, which is over Cyberpunk 2077 crashing on RADV when ray-tracing is enabled. Having RADV implement this month-old Vulkan extension may help other DirectX ray-tracing games too running on Linux via VKD3D-Proton.

Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux has been running well for a while thanks to Valve's Steam Play across multiple drivers while now the ray-traced options are beginning to work for the RADV driver.

While Cyberpunk 2077 should no longer crash when enabling ray-tracing for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, the performance isn't expected to be optimal at this point. Early indications are that the Cyberpunk 2077 ray-traced performance with RADV may be around half that of Windows with the Radeon Software driver or potentially even lower. But in any case it's at least progress being made and continuing to better the open-source Mesa Radeon graphics stack.

Mesa 23.1 stable with this RADV work and numerous other improvements will be out in May.