Sometimes new technologies can work on old hardware. Who needs one of the best graphics cards when you can just use older hardware? This week enthusiasts working on Mesa, an open source implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan APIs for Linux, created a merge request for the RADV ray tracing driver for AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs, enabling it to work with previous-generation graphics cards. The question is, how well will they work?
“This PR implements ray-tracing for older generations (Navi, Vega, Polaris, etc.),” wrote Joshua Ashton, a developer of DXVK and other Direct3D-on-Vulkan works for Valve, reports Phoronix. “It does this by emulating the AMD bvh intersection instructions in software. Right now this passes CTS the same as on RDNA 2 cards.”
In recent times software and hardware ray tracing support has been the focus of many industrial discussion as the technology has to be implemented properly to bring significant quality improvements. But that also causes massive performance hits even on modern hardware that supports hardware acceleration for ray tracing, such as AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs based on the RDNA 2 architecture.
