It seems that Intel has been “hiding” the true ray-tracing power of their Arc graphics cards because someone flunked and forgot to add which is arguably one of the most important lines.
According to TechBang, The latest merge request in the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver was spotted in a commit for the Mesa 22.2 update. Lionel Landwerlin, one of the folks over at the GPU driver department for Intel Linux, added a comment stating “Like a 100x (not joking) improvement”.
Although not everyone, if not all, netizens are calling this optimization or god-tier programming if one’s task is to fix something back to how it is supposed to be.
Image Credit: FutureTo summarize it in an easy way, as of pre-fixing the problem, the Vulkan driver is moving all the necessary data for ray-tracing into the system memory or the general RAM pool of the computer. However, it was supposed to be allocated to the GPU’s VRAM instead. As a result, all the extra distance and time used for pooling, moving, and using the RT data results in low performance as all of these are not handled by the graphics card.
The way of fixing it? Add the line of code that calls the「ANV_BO_ALLOC_LOCAL_MEM」function back into the main execute. There you have it.
As the Mesa 22.2 driver is slated for release in the coming weeks, let’s see how much is that 100x improvement because there’s not much of a relative comparison that I know.
Sources: TechBang, TomsHardware
