Ray Tracing Without a GPU! I hope 1 FPS is OK!?

A developer working on Mesa 3D Graphics Library gave an interesting demonstration this week. They’ve implemented support for CPU-based ray tracing in Vulkan, and while it’s an interesting proof of concept, it’s unlikely the big GPU brands are quaking in their boots, at least not yet.

Quake II RTX

In an early test of the new driver using Quake II RTX, Developer Konstantin Seurer showed that while the effect worked perfectly fine, the game ran at a pathetic 1 frame per second. Personally, I still think that’s really impressive, given that something similar a decade ago could have taken minutes per frame to render. Still, if and when CPUs do get to 60 FPS+ it’s likely GPU rendering will have blasted way past what it is currently capable of.

I mean, they did say “Don’t ask about performance”, but well, we ignored that.

Ray Tracing Without a GPU

Unfortunately, we don’t know what CPU he was running this on, but it looks like it may have been running at 720p, but this is unconfirmed at this time. However, we do know his work was mostly focused on Linux development, Lavepipe integration, and porting code from the RADV Vulkan Drivers, typically used for users of AMD Radeon hardware and RT emulation on pre-RDNA2 GPUs. What settings he may have used to get to 1 FPS is unknown, but I suspect they were pretty conservative.

I’ll be interested to see if this goes any further, and while it’s clear that Lavapipe Vulkan Ray Tracing isn’t useful for gamers right now, but perhaps may have uses in the future.

Alternatively, here’s the same game running on Nvidia hardware.