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In a nutshell: Everyone knows it’s the GPU that does the heavy lifting with ray tracing in video games. With devoted compute items primed for rendering these life like rays of sunshine, the concept of operating ray tracing on a measly CPU seems like a recipe for a slideshow. Nonetheless, one madlad modder simply went forward and did it anyway – and did so on Linux, no much less.
Developer Konstantin Seurer has been hacking away on the open-source Mesa graphics library, including assist for Vulkan ray tracing proper into the CPU code. By enabling the VK_KHR_ray_query performance, Seurer made ray tracing potential with out a GPU in any respect. Simply to show it really works, he fired up the Quake II RTX with CPU-based ray tracing enabled.
The efficiency metrics are removed from spectacular. A single shared screenshot reveals the sport struggling at a mere 1 body per second.
Seurer admits that his work is generally based mostly on porting code from the RADV Vulkan drivers, which have been designed for AMD Radeon graphics playing cards. He additionally hasn’t divulged what sort of CPU horsepower he was working with to tug this off. It positive is a breakthrough, however the scant particulars depart us with some questions. Like, what sort of processor is dealing with all of it. Is it an all-conquering 96-core Threadripper or a humble laptop computer chip?
Quake II RTX additionally affords a slew of graphics knobs that permit customers adjust settings like world illumination and reflection depth. Nonetheless, the settings used to realize the reported 1 fps stay undisclosed, leaving us at midnight relating to the visible configurations that have been enabled.
Oddly, the CPU utilization stood at simply 34% in the mean time the screenshot was taken, a head-scratcher contemplating the CPU ought to’ve been combating for its life making an attempt to run one thing it wasn’t designed for. It raises the query: would reaching 100% utilization have tripled the body price to a much less atrocious 3 fps? With out additional particulars, it is tough to say.
Whereas CPU ray tracing is probably not viable, it is nonetheless a cool proof-of-concept that exhibits the potential for at some point operating sure purposes with hyper-realistic lighting utilizing simply an ordinary processor.
We’re not suggesting that avid gamers might be abandoning their GPUs to play the sequel to Cyberpunk with CPU-only graphics any time quickly. Nonetheless, as CPU expertise continues to advance, the potential purposes for CPU-based ray tracing, particularly for much less demanding duties, might develop considerably.
If you wish to give it a whirl, Seurer’s ray tracing code will ship within the upcoming Mesa 24.1 release.
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