Ray tracing could be extra commonplace in video games as of late nevertheless it’s nonetheless seen as a massively tough graphics characteristic to course of, requiring highly effective graphics playing cards with devoted ray tracing processors. Nonetheless, one developer has proven that possibly there’s one other manner by enabling ray tracing on a CPU.
The developer, named Konstantin Seurer, has been steadily engaged on including options to a purely CPU-run Vulkan-based model of the open supply Mesa graphics library. By enabling the operate Implement VK_KHR_ray_query, the modder has opened up the opportunity of working ray tracing capabilities on CPUs, demonstrating the power utilizing an authorized traditional, Quake 2.
Sadly, Konstantin hasn’t offered any particulars of the {hardware} they used to realize their gaming milestone, so we don’t know whether or not it was solely manageable with the likes of a 96-core Threadripper chip or a extra modest possibility similar to an Intel Core i5-14600K. Regardless of the chosen chip was, although, clearly there’s room for some enchancment as Konstantin feedback, “Don’t ask about efficiency”.
Largely, we’ll must belief their phrase on that as solely a single screenshot of the characteristic has been offered on the venture’s gitlab web page. Nonetheless, that screenshot does present that on the time of the screenshot the body fee was being recorded at 1fps with 34% CPU utilisation – additionally word the 0% GPU utilisation, displaying that is all working on CPU.
Fairly how or why solely 34% of the CPU is getting used will not be made clear. Whereas many video games – notably older ones – don’t help utilizing the additional cores of multi-core CPUs, that’s usually solely as regards the principle sport thread. As soon as options similar to graphics are being processed on the CPU and never being offloaded to a GPU, we would count on that workload to be unfold out to different cores – simply as how a GPU makes use of hundreds of GPU cores to unfold out and course of graphics workloads – however that’s maybe not an possibility right here.
Regardless of the case, clearly there’s a option to go earlier than we would be capable of think about working video games with ray tracing purely on a CPU a viable possibility. If you wish to attempt it, although, after sitting in approval mode for just a few months, Konstantin’s ray tracing additions will lastly be obtainable for customers to attempt with the Mesa 24.1 launch.
For those who’d fairly simply skip to having a playable ray tracing expertise proper now, although, we propose trying out the likes of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Tremendous or RTX 4080 Tremendous to get a stellar expertise for a not ludicrous worth.
