AMD has been really investing in the Linux sector for gaming for some time, something that is not forgotten, but it has not really caught on, for whatever reason. Steam Deck has been a leap forward in this area and given that the performance between Linux and Windows for gaming is very even, it seems that Lisa Su’s have seen a market opportunity here, a vein, that NVIDIA does not finish seeing and that Intel also wants to take little by little. For this reason, the driver RADV of a new generation that prepares AMD will improve a lot ray tracing.

Ray tracing is now, path tracing is the future, so everything invested now can make a real difference in gaming and GPU performance, and if not, tell NVIDIA who got there first and maintains the advantage. For this reason, AMD intends to turn events taking advantage of the disdain of the greens, and in what way.

AMD Driver Mesa Vulkan RADV, a significant advance in Ray Tracing

The official implementation is close, but in the meantime, several developers have wanted to share what is coming soon. We refer to Friedrich Vöckwhich has declared the following in reference to the implementation of support for batch build build speedups:

“This makes radv_CmdBuildAccelerationStructuresKHR in a simple shim that pushes the actual build commands to a queue, where they are accumulated and sent as late as possible.

This especially helps with games that don’t do any batching of build commands of their own. For example, triple the performance of hitman 3“.

Of course, Vock is not referring to us getting three times more FPS, which would be almost magic, but he is referring to the performance in Ray Tracing, which is the main Achilles heel of AMD generation after generation, where it fails to catch to NVIDIA in this section.

How much does this performance increase in Ray Tracing affect the actual FPS?

It is the big question, because many expect precisely the support for Linux and Mesa of this technology, almost unplayable in some titles as such when activated. For this reason, Vock gives us some first general figures for the increase in FPS in certain titles, which are not a reference in many cases, although they are widely played:

“The performance improvement of this PR is huge in some games, of the ones I have, lego builds Journey gets an improvement double in performance. Control gets ~5fps additions to 1080p, Minecraft RTX (Education Edition) gets ~10fps more. When combined with the monolithic MR pipeline, it completely blows amdvlk “out of the water”. Tested on my RX 6800″

You can follow the progress of the project, which should be implemented in just a few weeks and launched shortly after, from Gitlab in real time. In any case, it represents a qualitative leap in performance that could bring AMD closer to NVIDIA in this OS with Protonone more step to bring Linux to the mass gaming sector.