Significant Performance Boost for RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs with New RADV Patches; Quake II RTX Shows 14% Increase in Ray Tracing Performance

Recent updates to the Radeon RADV driver have paved the way for significant enhancements in ray tracing performance for both the Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 series GPUs, particularly in gaming applications.

Enhancements in the Radeon Vulkan Driver Pre-Mesa 25.2 Code Freeze

In addition to focusing on long-standing Radeon GPUs, developers in the Linux open-source community are diligently advancing patches aimed at boosting performance for the latest graphics hardware. The newly integrated patches in the Mesa 3D Graphics Library are specifically designed to elevate the capabilities of RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs, as detailed by Phoronix. These significant updates have now been incorporated into Mesa’s Git repository.

Thanks to the work of Valve contractor Natalie Vock, a fresh set of optimizations has emerged just before the Mesa 25.2 code freeze, set to substantially improve ray tracing capabilities for these graphics cards. The patches, identified by GFX11 and GFX12 codes, correlate with the Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA 3) and RX 9000 (RDNA 4) series, indicating that users can expect noticeable enhancements in gaming performance.

Code update overview with performance improvements for GFX11 and GFX12 instructions.

Internal benchmarks reveal a remarkable 14% performance increase for the Radeon RX 9000 series in Quake II RTX, suggesting that similar results could be anticipated across various gaming titles. These updates will also contribute to bridging the performance gap between NVIDIA and AMD GPUs on Linux platforms.

Futuristic industrial interior with armored characters and water feature, sci-fi environment.

This new patch introduces specialized GPU instructions such as ds_bvh_stack_rtn for RDNA 3 and ds_bvh_stack_push8_pop1_rtn for RDNA 4. These low-level directives focus on refining ray tracing processes, optimizing the traversal of bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) within the GPU architecture. Consequently, these enhancements promise reduced memory operations alongside improved efficiency.

Insights from Phoronix have previously highlighted the advancements in ray tracing performance using the Radeon RX 9070 with Mesa 25.2. With the recent updates, expectations for further performance gains with RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 GPUs are high.

Source&Images