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Intel’s GPU drivers speed up ray-tracing by 100x, one line of code was missing

Intel is planning a major attack on the dedicated graphics card market, where it wants to compete with AMD and Nvidia. But for that, he needs to fine-tune the drivers and remove errors from them. One of them was fixed in the latest version of the Intel Mesa 22.2 drivers for the Linux operating system in the Vulkan interface. The bug fix was able to increase ray-tracing performance by a factor of 100. Something like this indicates that there was a serious error that significantly worsened the efficiency of the entire process.

The problem was quite simple. Ray-tracing should ideally work with fast memory on the graphics card. However, due to a missing line of code in the drivers, the necessary memory was not allocated correctly on the graphics card, but classic RAM memory was used. So the computer had to do a lot of unnecessary and slow transfers from/to RAM. It was enough to set the ANV_BO_ALLOC_LOCAL_MEM flag correctly to allocate memory in VRAM instead of RAM, resulting in a 100x speedup of ray-tracing.

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