The latest Radeon RADV driver ray-tracing optimization being merged to Mesa 25.3 is support for triangle pair compression with RDNA4 (GFX12) graphics processors.

Konstantin Seurer who has worked for Valve as one of the RADV developers the past few years worked out the newest RADV ray-tracing improvement. Basic support for triangle pair compression on GFX12 (RDNA4) graphics processors was merged yesterday to Mesa 25.3-devel after being under review the past month.

This compression technique groups adjacent triangles into pairs with the shared edges leading to better memory bandwidth efficiency and increased cache utilization. Triangle pair compression should help with overall ray-tracing performance thanks to faster ray intersections.

No performance numbers were shared as part of [1]the Mesa merge request adding this triangle pair compression to Mesa RADV for Radeon RX 9000 "RDNA4" GPUs but every bit counts with Valve's relentless optimization work for this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver especially for ray-tracing where it has traditionally lagged behind but in recent months done a very fine job at becoming increasingly performant.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/35734