Portal RTX was released last week by NVIDIA's Lightspeed Studios. This is the same team who gave a facelift to Quake. Portal's downloadable content is meant to bring life to the source engine with advanced ray tracing options. However, the upgrades lack AMD support, especially if you are a Linux user. This will not stop the Mesa3D team from upgrading the RADV (Radeon Vulkan) driver to allow that same or similar feel to Portal RTX.
RADV Vulkan driver for AMD Linux users sees continued assistance for Portal RTX
Portal RTX, just like Quake RTX that release before it, utilizes next-gen ray-tracing technology in the game that visually adds shadows and lighting effects not seen in the original game and adds texture paths to give the game almost an entirely new look. We recently reported how Lightspeed Studios added hints of NVIDIA throughout the game, including QR codes that could be scanned to unlock more easter eggs.
For the Mesa RADV driver, there is plenty to be done to make the game playable, but the initial support is there. But, for AMD Radeon graphics card owners, the game has yet to support the hardware completely. Yesterday, the fixes for RADV and NIR were merged into the Mesa GitLab. The changes affect texture sampling and incorrect handling. This new fix does come with some glitches, as shown below.
Here are the updated fixes from two days ago before the merge:
- 7b5ac0ae - radv/rt: Work around incorrect NOT_DEFERRED handling in Portal RTX
- 48ae92ce - radv/rt: Propagate radv_pipeline_key
- cdd68cba - radv/rt: Hash the pipeline key
- 7a994d92 - spirv: Add a debug option to force nonuniform texture sampling
- 9492b84a - radv: Add a driconf option to force nonuniform texture sampling
- 5751ae45 - radv: Force nonuniform texture sampling with NV Remix
Michael Larabel of the website Phoronix mentions that this new merge follows an earlier fix for UE4 (Unreal Engine 4) and Portal's ray-tracing RTX shaders created for the Radeon Vulkan driver. Mesa 23.0 is expected to release in the next quarter during 2023, and it is anticipated that AMD Radeon GPU Linux players will have a chance by then if not before, to play the game under the open-source platform.
News Sources: Phoronix, Mesa GitLab
