To improve the RTX capabilities of Quake II’s recent performance, AMD is implementing a Parallel Locally-Ordered Clustering to facilitate creating bounding volume hierarchy nodes, or PLOC BVH. The graphical performance of Quake II’s (RTX version) Radeon Vulkan driver will increase by as much as 33% thanks to the new PLOC BVH builder that Friedrich Vock and Bas Nieuwnhuizen recently requested to merge.

The framework of the PLOC BVH builder’s task-splitting algorithm and in-shader global synchronization is comparable to that of the GPU ray-tracing project, or GPURT. The GPURT project enabled AMD’s open-source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, so it may now compete with RADV in the Mesa Project.

At the X.org Developers Conference (XDC 2022) last month, Nieuwenhuizen gave a presentation on the fundamentals of ray tracing and talked about AMD and the company’s Radeon RDNA 2 GPUs, which make use of the technology.

The team’s challenges implementing ray-tracing in earlier AMD GPU generations were one subject of conversation.

In the merge request, Vock added that “According to benchmarking on a 6700XT, Q2RTX and the Dnipro demos have a 33% improvement. The longer construction times hurt control, but it does improve slightly (about from 47 to 51 FPS).”

Although it seems like the development time is slightly impacted, it also seems like advancements are being made that will help both AMD and NVIDIA with their respective Vulkan ray-tracing technologies.

Before the opportunity for adding features to Mesa 22.3 closes in the beginning part of next month, AMD has introduced several hundred lines of additional code, according to Michael Larabel of the website Phoronix.

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