AMD Older GPUs To Get Raytracing Support Thanks To RADV

According to the newest merge request, earlier AMD GPUs such as the RDNA 1, Vega, and Polaris series will also acquire support for Vulkan Ray-tracing. The company is releasing the RADV ‘Radeon Vulkan’ drivers after AMD RDNA 2 which will make it possible.

Joshua Ashton, who is known for his work on DSVK and other Direct3D-on-Vulkan efforts for Valve, initiated the request, according to Phoronix. Joshua first mentioned his plans to convert Vulkan Raytracing to older AMD GPUs in June. And it now appears that his dreams are becoming a reality.

According to Joshua, older AMD GPUs pass the CTS (conformance test suite) just as RDNA 2 GPUs. While older AMD GPUs like the RDNA 1, Vega, and Polaris don’t have raytracing hardware embedded in like the RDNA 2; they can imitate it with software (BVH intersection instructions). However, you can’t ensure the functionality will operate properly. Because even RDNA 2 GPU drivers for Vulkan (RADV) aren’t guaranteed to work. Let alone RDNA 1 and older GPUs.

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Some users have got the RADV drivers

Several users have been able to get RADV Vulkan Raytracing to operate on Navi 10 and Polaris 10 GPUs. When running Quake 2 RTX on his AMD Navi 10 GPU, a user encountered a few issues, but after generating a fresh compile, raytracing was operating on the older card. Thus it appears to work. However, it should be highlighted that software approaches are considerably inferior to hardware integration in terms of performance and quality.

As a result, GPUs that claim to be raytracing enabled always have RT hardware components built-in. NVIDIA’s RT cores, AMD’s RA cores, and Intel’s dedicated hardware blocks for raytracing will all be available shortly. While they can run raytracing-enabled games and software, their performance pales in comparison to dedicated raytracing GPUs.

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