There have been a number of nice RADV driver Vulkan ray-tracing performance optimizations for Mesa in recent times… Here is yet another merge request now merged for Mesa 26.0 and helping deliver some nice performance uplift for ray-traced games on Linux. And, yes, this is yet another Valve contribution to this open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver.
Konstantin Seurer has implemented HPLOC support for the RADV Vulkan driver. HPLOC is Hierarchical Parallel Locally-Ordered Clustering and is a faster algorithm to construct Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVH). AMD engineers previously described HPLOC in this 2024 GPUOpen whitepaper.
Konstantin Seurer as one of the Valve contractors on the Linux graphics team found the BVH quality with HPLOC to be comparable to the existing PLOC use but much faster. He noted in the merge request saving around ~1ms of frame time in using HPLOC for Top-Level Acceleration Structure (TLAS) builds.
In comments to that merge request Cyberpunk 2077 is reported as around 5% faster and other games being up to 2~3% faster thanks to this code.
As of yesterday that latest AMD RADV ray-tracing improvement is now merged ahead of the upcoming Mesa 26.0 feature release going out as stable in February.
