Mesa Linux implementation incorporates support for Vulkan Ray-Tracing for AMD Polaris, RDNA1 and Vega

Ray tracing in games requires a huge amount of computation to be used in games, which is why both AMD and Nvidia implemented specific cores for this task in their latest generations of GPUs. This is not to say that they cannot be done with traditional cores, which is proven in the latest Mesa update, the open source implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan for Linux, which enables support for Vulkan Ray-Tracing on AMD Polaris GPUs. , RDNA1 and Vega.

The update was proposed by the developer Joshua Ashton through a Merge Request, where he explains that his new code allows software to emulate the ray-tracing instructions by executing them with traditional instructions, allowing Vulkan Ray-Tracing to run on GPUs that do not support the instructions. by Ray Tracing.

Some users have already been testing this update on Quake II RTX, compiling the game from its source code with this new version of Mesa since the Steam version has not yet incorporated it, and as reported, it works as indicated.

It will be interesting to see if this Merge Request is accepted in the main branch of Mesa, and then, what games add this new version to support Ray-Tracing on the Radeon RX 400, RX 500, RX 5000, and RX Vega. We will keep you informed of any news.

What do you think about the addition of Vulkan Ray-Tracing in Linux for Polaris, RDNA1 and Vega? Do you plan to try it?

Source: Videocardz