I am back with another status update on raytracing in RADV. And the good news is that things are finally starting to come together. After ~9 months of on and off work we’re now having games working with raytracing. Working on first try after getting all the required functionality was Control:

After poking for a long time at CTS and demos it is really nice to see the fruits of ones work.

The piece that I added recently was copy/compaction and serialization of acceleration structures which was a bunch of shader writing, handling another type of queries and dealing with indirect dispatches. (Since of course the API doesn’t give the input size on the CPU. No idea how this API should be secured …)

What games?

I did try 5 games:

1. Quake 2 RTX (Vulkan): works. This was working already on my previous update.
2. Control (D3D): works. Pretty much just works. Runs at maybe 30-50% of RT performance on Windows.
3. Metro Exodus (Vulkan): works. Needs one workaround and is very finicky in WSI but otherwise works fine. Runs at 20-25% of RT performance on Windows.
4. Ghostrunner (D3D): Does not work. This really needs per shadergroup compilation instead of just mashing all the shaders together as I get shaders now with 1 million NIR instructions, which is a pain to debug.
5. Doom Eternal (Vulkan): Does not work. The raytracing option in the menu stays grayed out and at this point I’m at a loss what is required to make the game allow enabling RT.

If anybody could tell me how to get Doom Eternal to allow RT I’d appreciate it.

What is next?

Of course the support is far from done. Some things to still make progress on:

1. Upstreaming what I have. Samuel has been busy reviewing my MRs and I think there is a good chance that what I have now will make it into 21.3.
2. Improve the pipeline compilation model to hopefully make ghostrunner work.
3. Improved BVH building. The current BVH is really naive, which is likely one of the big performance factors.
4. Improve traversal.
5. Move on to stuff needed for DXR 1.1 like VK_KHR_ray_query.

P.S. If you haven’t seen it yet, Jason Ekstrand from Intel recently gave a talk about how Intel implements raytracing. Nice showcase of how you can provide some more involved hardware implementation than RDNA2 does.