Mesa’s Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” has been working with Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal games for a while now, and performance has also improved nicely. As described in the last benchmarks. But for Vulkan’s ray tracing extensions to be exposed, it took tuning RADV_PERFTEST = RT environment variable, but this has now changed in the beginning for these two games.
As one of the last commits to the Mesa database for 2022, the RADV driver in Mesa 23.0 is ready to announce support for Quake II RTX and DOOM Eternal as the ray tracing environment variable option is no longer needed. Currently, Vulkan ray-tracing is not unconditionally enabled, but only a selective whitelist with initial games for Quake II RTX and then DOOM Eternal with the latter game running on Linux via Steam Play (Proton). In particular, the extension VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline is what is exposed.
This merge request It declares ray tracing pipelines for the two games, so at least there you can run games right away without having to remember to use RADV_PERFTEST = rt. On this merge, Bas Nieuwenhuizen commented on why the support hasn’t been flipped unconditionally yet:
Since it’s not ready, we’re especially missing Daniel’s shader summon work and some game debugging.
However, it’s helpful to start enabling some of the games that we know work, so people can start playing.”
The merge adds a new DriConf “radv_rt” option, so it’s easy to move forward for other ray tracing games that take advantage of VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline to whitelist support based on application name via DriConf XML.
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