MESA “RADV” Vulkan drivers deliver huge ray tracing performance gains for AMD’s Radeon GPUs under Linux

The RADV Vulkan driver developed for AMD graphics cards has made significant progress recently, especially in terms of hardware support, continuous optimization and bug fixes. Until now, ray tracing on Linux has been held back due to a lack of “mature” drivers and software resources, but it seems that MESA has now created solutions here. The new Radeon Vulkan driver has been optimized to deliver significant performance improvements with the latest Radeon GPUs from AMD.

The new update for MESA 24.0 has been driven for almost a month by developer Friedrich Vock. Although the change is not particularly significant in terms of workload, the conversion of 1D ray launches to 2D has been optimized to use more threads on a GPU and thus improve performance. Below you can see the first performance tests with the new MESA “RADV” Vulkan driver shared by the MESA community on FreeDesktop.org.

Performance comparison before and after gaming with the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT “RDNA 2” GPU:

After implementing the new drivers, the developer noticed a 30% performance increase in Ghostwire: Tokyo. In addition, tests with AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT showed a significant improvement in ray tracing performance of up to 15% in several titles such as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT also showed significant performance gains, with numbers increasing by up to 200%. This is due to the new driver states and the continuous optimizations that have been made over time.

The MESA RADV Vulkan driver is emerging as a viable alternative to AMD’s Vulkan “AMDVLK” driver. Third-party developers are supporting outdated hardware and bringing performance improvements with updates. AMD needs to stay competitive, but for now MESA seems to be ahead on Linux.

Source: Phoronix