Intel open-source Vulkan driver for ray tracing gets “100x improvement”

Intel open-source Vulkan driver for ray tracing gets “100x improvement”

Intel open-source Vulkan driver for ray tracing gets “100x improvement”.

Intel recently incorporated a ray tracing fix into the open source Mesa Vulkan driver.

According to Lionel Landwerlin, Intel’s Linux graphics driver engineer , “The fix provides like a 100x (no joke) improvement.” The merge has now landed in Mesa 22.2.

According to media Phoronix , this change only fixes a big bug, adding an allocation flag to allocate the ray tracing memory that should have been allocated to the GPU .

Previously, Intel proposed an ANV change that wanted to ensure that scratch memory for Vulkan ray tracing was allocated to DG2/Alchemist graphics cards as local device memory for the GPU.

However, so far, the temporary memory of ray tracing has not been set with any allocation flag , and all the temporary memory will only be allocated back to the general system memory, which will cause the GPU of the graphics card to lose the memory it deserves, resulting in low performance.

Therefore, Intel has set the “ANV_BO_ALLOC_LOCAL_MEM” flag for it in this fix, which will ensure that the scratch memory from the buffer resides on the Intel GPU’s local memory.

Missing an allocation marker is a fatal mistake, leading directly to a huge performance penalty. 

We don’t know why the function code missed such an important allocation flag, and it passed the review, but luckily at least the problem was discovered before the full release of Intel Arc series graphics cards.

Mesa 22.2 with this ray tracing fix/optimization and a ton of other improvements to the open source Intel Linux graphics driver will be available for a stable release around the end of August.