The developers of the Intel GPU drivers for Linux have released an update that improves ray tracing performance by 100x. Prior to this, video cards were running 100 times slower due to a bug in the driver code, which led to incorrect memory allocation in the system.
Image Source: Intel
Phoronix reported on the inclusion of the fix in the open source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver. An error in the driver code was discovered by one of the Intel graphics driver engineers for Linux, Lionel Landwerlin, published data regarding it in the open GitHub Mesa repository. As the engineer explained, before implementing ray tracing, Vulkan used external system memory (RAM connected to the motherboard) instead of the local GDDR6 memory of the video card. The driver was missing one line of code that would be responsible for reallocating memory to perform this task. Thus, the Vulkan driver was moving ray tracing data to and from slower external system memory, resulting in slower performance.
Image Source: Tom’s Hardware
The result of adding the right line of code, namely the ANV_BO_ALLOC_LOCAL_MEM command, was a 100x improvement in ray tracing performance on Intel graphics cards when using the Vulkan API.
According to Phoronix, the changes made to the driver code have already been approved and will appear with the next Mesa 22.2 software release. The latter, in turn, will be incorporated into a suite of other Linux driver enhancements that will be available to end users by the end of August.
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