Valve Creates The Ray-Tracing Inspector “RTI” To Help Further Optimize Linux GPU Drivers
Valve Creates The Ray-Tracing Inspector “RTI” To Help Further Optimize Linux GPU Drivers
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Ray-Tracing-Inspector-RTI
Publish Date: 2026-06-22 06:33:00
Source Domain: www.phoronix.com
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 is the Ray-Tracing Inspector “RTI” as a new GUI created by developers on Valve’s open-source Linux graphics team. The Ray-Tracing Inspector is designed to help in analyzing and optimizing the Vulkan ray-tracing performance as part of their continued work on further bettering the Radeon RADV RT performance for Steam Play / Linux gaming.
Konstantin Seurer of Valve’s Linux team worked on creating this tool for inspecting RT acceleration structures and ray tracing dispatches. This GUI tool is based on some of the existing RADV debug bits and tooling. The GUI is written using ImGUI with Vulkan and SDL3 support.
This driver is merged to mainline Mesa and initially focused on the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver. It will be possible moving forward to extend RTI to covering other hardware/drivers with different back-ends. Building it can be done via the “-D tools=rti” Meson build option. This RTI tool isn’t for end-users but for developers working to analyze and optimize the ray-tracingg performance.
The RADV driver is able to dump the internal BVH and ray history data when the RADV_DEBUG=rti environment variable is set for creating an RTI file dump in /tmp that can then be loaded into this new RTI tool for inspecting the acceleration structures and RT dispatches. This new tool comes after Valve has done immense work in recent years on improving the Vulkan ray-tracing performance in Mesa/RADV.
Those wanting to learn more can do so via this merge request now in Mesa 26.1. At least as of writing though, the FreeDesktop.org GitLab seems to be suffering from some load issues / partial outages. In any case, kudos to Valve’s Linux team for continuing to keep pushing open-source Linux GPU drivers forward.
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