Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan Driver Makes First Steps Towards Ray-Tracing

There still is much work left to be completed but Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has made its first baby steps towards ray-tracing support with Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" series hardware.

RADV lead developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen announced his "first rays" progress in being able to provide RDNA2 Vulkan ray-tracing with the RADV driver. After hacking on the functionality the past few weeks, Bas hit his personal milestones including a fully recursive Fibonnaci shader and a ray-traced cube:

Obviously there is much work left before being able to run any Vulkan ray-tracing demos / benchmarks or Windows DXR games on Linux via VKD3D-Proton (that itself is still a work in progress), but Bas is tackling it and it will be interesting to see how long it takes for the rest of the work to materialize. In particular, whether Vulkan ray-tracing support for RADV could be buttoned up in time for the stable Mesa 21.2 release in Q3.

So there is RADV ray-tracing progress but much functionality is left to be tackled before even getting to performance tuning. It will also be interesting to see if RADV manages to beat AMDVLK to Vulkan ray-tracing extension support.