A new merge request opened today for Mesa’s Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” by Valve contractor Natalie Vock provides another significant boost for the Vulkan ray-tracing performance in multiple titles.
Over the past year RADV ray-tracing performance improved a lot as one of the lingering areas where RADV remained behind the now defunct AMDVLK driver and where NVIDIA has long had a performance advantage with ray-traced games. Already this year there have been some nice performance improvements while another exciting merge request is pending for bringing more gains.
The key takeaway for AMD Radeon Linux gamers with today’s pull request:
“Compiling RT pipelines in UE4 games with raytracing (e.g. Ghostwire Tokyo, The Callisto Protocol) becomes 10 times faster. Yes, an order of magnitude! In one Ghostwire Tokyo Fossilize capture I gathered, time to replay went from 4 minutes and 20 seconds to just 20 seconds. These UE games also tended to have quite terrible stuttering whenever a new RT pipeline was compiled. That stuttering is gone completely.”
The merge request now uses function calls to separate out any-hit/intersection shader compilation. Function calls for ray-tracing are now used for “really cool stuff” in building off this now-merged code that hit Mesa Git earlier today.
Natalie Vock added in today’s new merge request:
“On top of that, runtime performance improves by a lot [in affected applications] as well. Who knew that inlining hundreds of shaders into an incredibly hot loop might be bad for performance?! From quick napkin math, I think the pure RT performance in Ghostwire Tokyo improves by over 2x. In any case, FPS goes from ~30 to ~40 on my 7900XTX.
It seems like with the MR, we roughly match Windows performance in the Ghostwire Tokyo scene I tested, as well. Performance improvements on different apps/non-UE4 titles may vary, but I’m pretty sure quite a few apps should benefit. (Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t, though. It only really uses 1 any-hit shader at the maximum and is therefore unaffected by this MR.)”
It seems RADV is off to a really great 2026.
The code is now under review. With Mesa 26.0 code branching / feature freeze imminent, it might not be merged in time for this quarter’s Mesa 26.0 release in which case it may not be found in a stable release until Mesa 26.1 in Q2.
