Konstantin Seurer as one of the open-source developers working on the RADV driver for Valve has landed another ray-tracing performance optimization for the upcoming Mesa 26.0 release.

Merged today to Mesa 26.0-devel Git for the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is optimizing the BVH4 acceleration structure updates. Seurer explains in the [1]merge request :

"It is more efficient to compute the child index of the current node inside the parent node and write the bounds when available. The previous code could load up to 16 AABBs to compute the new ones. The new code also only needs 1/7 of the previously used scratch memory. The new code seems to be around 30% faster (0.5ms) in GOTG on a 6700XT."

Much lower scratch memory use and recording 30% faster performance on a Radeon RX 6700 XT (RDNA2) for the Guardians of the Galaxy "GOTG" game with Steam Play is quite a win to kick off the new year.

[2]Mesa 26.0 stable should be out in February with quite a nice variety of improvements to not only RADV and RadeonSI but the numerous other open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers too.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/39139

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Mesa+26.0