What's the state of raytracing on Linux in 2023?

[doalwa]

Hey everybody,

I just finished setting up Gentoo on my main rig a few days ago. It's equipped with a AMD Ryzen 5800X3D CPU, 32 Gigs of RAM and sporting a AMD RX7900XT GPU.
All installed on a 4 TB Crucial NVMe drive and mounted to a Asus X470 Prime mainboard.

I've been running Gentoo on an older Dell Latitude laptop for the past few years, mainly for light file server duty and decided to take the plunge after seeing how great Proton on the Steam Deck is in turning Linux into a viable alternative for Gamers....that, and I'm really fed up with the whole Microsoft ecosystem.

Getting 3d hardware acceleration going was no effort at all. Simply installing the Gentoo distribution kernel, Gnome 44 and Steam was everything I needed to do.

I did not install Xorg and choose to side with Wayland...from the looks of it, everything is working fine.

Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 run just as good as they did under Windows 11 on the same machine.

One thing missing, though, especially from Cyberpunk, is Raytracing support.

So, what's the state of Raytracing support on Linux these days? Is it at all supported? What components are responsible for enabling it? Mesa? The AMDGPU driver in the kernel?

Thanks in advance for your replies and, most importantly, keep on gaming
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Keepin' the Funk alive since 1983!

[shadowless]

I don't have a new GPU yet, so I haven't gotten to try raytracing yet...

Liam Dawe over at gamingonlinux.com has been writing regular articles on it though. You can check them out here:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/search-articles/?q=raytracing

[Screenager]

You need to be very up to date with everything but ray tracing should already be possible, at least on Nvidia.
VKD3D-Proton is what you should be looking for. I am not far enough with my own installation to give you more info.
It is the reason why I move everything to gentoo now. Wayland+Nvidia+Multimonitor with different refresh rates is finally becoming viable.
Don't get me wrong the whole Nvidia driver thing is a joke - they should just open source it - but CUDA and OptiX...

[doalwa]

Unfortunately, I went with AMD on my last GPU purchase, thinking what works on my Steam Deck should also work on my Gentoo machine.

Well, think again...I didn't account for the fact that indeed Valve's own Gamescope compositor seems to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to RayTracing and HDR.

It would be awesome if someday soon Valve would provide official download links for their Steam OS to install it on ones own machine.
They did a bang up job with Steam OS and the Steam Deck...if it would be possible to use their OS on my own, more capable hardware I could finally ditch Windows for good...one can dream!

Apart from HDR and Raytracing not really working I am however surprised how far gaming on Linux has come.

We're 95% of the way there, hopefully we'll reach true parity with Windows and gaming consoles someday soon.
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Keepin' the Funk alive since 1983!

[Screenager]

Fret not! According to my research it is still possible on AMD.

VKD3D-Proton is actively maintained in gentoo.
You would just need to set special enviroment variables for VKD3D and/or mesa for each game. So it is best you just search for "$whatever_game_you_want_to_play + raytracing + AMD + linux" and see for yourself.
This is basically emulation so the same rules apply: If you manage to run a PS3 emulator you should be capable to run any game under linux, you need to fiddle with the settings. Sometimes there are huge benefits in going "unstable" (if you have 25fps stable becomes unstable ) and even use nightly builds. The discussions I find are 6+ months old, performance might be better now on AMD raytracing.