According to the latest sources, the Open-source graphics library, MESA, has recently included the Raytracing support on older AMD Radeon GPUs with the latest RADV drivers. And this news gives hope to many who were waiting for older RDNA based cards to this amazing technology.
We know that AMD’s RDNA2 GPUs already support this amazing feature and now it’s the turn of older AMD GPUs which include RDNA 1, Vega, and Polaris series to get support for Vulkan Ray-tracing with RADV ‘Radeon Vulkan’ drivers.
The request was opened up by Joshua Ashton who is known for his work on DSVK & various other Direct3D-on-Vulkan efforts for Valve.
Following is the specific request as listed at FreeDesktop:
radv: Implement ray-tracing for older generations
This PR implements ray-tracing for older generations (Navi, Vega, Polaris, etc.)
It does this by emulating the AMD bvh intersection instructions in software.
Right now this passes CTS the same as on RDNA 2 cards.
via FreeDesktop
As we know, older AMD GPUs such as RDNA 1, Vega, and Polaris doesn’t have any raytracing hardware built within them as RDNA 2 does, however, they still have the ability to emulate raytracing (BVH intersection instructions) via software methods.
Joshua pointed out that the older AMD GPUs pass the CTS (conformance test suite), which is the same qualification for Ray Tracing that the RDNA 2 GPUs possess. However, we still cannot guarantee the feature to work properly as even RDNA 2 GPU drivers for Vulkan (RADV) are far from good, let alone RDNA 1 and older GPUs.
According to reports from several users who have been able to get RADV Vulkan Raytracing working on Navi 10 and Polaris 10 GPUs, we still have some hopes of finding a work-around method for this technique.
However, many users also reported some errors, there is a case of a user who got into a few errors when running Quake 2 RTX on his AMD Navi 10 GPU but after building a fresh compile, raytracing was working on the older card.
So if you want to try any of the methods to enable Ray-Tracing then proceed with the request.
