The RADV ray-tracing improvement covered earlier this week for some big performance gains for Unreal Engine 5 titles running under Linux thanks to Steam Play has been merged for Mesa 26.0.
The improvement made by Valve contractor Natalie Vock for reworking the launch ID swizzling of the RADV ray-tracing code fixes the Unreal Engine 5 illumination and reflection system. As shown in that prior article, there are big performance improvements expected for at least UE5 game titles when running on this now-merged code for the open-source RADV Vulkan driver:
In the past hour the code is now merged to Mesa Git ahead of the Mesa 26.0 code branching / feature freeze expected as soon as next week.
Mesa 26.0 stable should be out in February with the latest RADV ray-tracing improvements and a whole lot more not only for AMD Radeon open-source graphics but also the Intel drivers, the NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver, and numerous smaller drivers. Mesa 26.0 should pair very nicely with Linux 6.19+ for the early 2026 Linux distribution releases like Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44.
