A new merge request for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) was opened today, January 15, 2026, by Valve contractor Natalie Vock. This update provides a significant boost for Vulkan ray-tracing performance, specifically by enabling up to 10x faster ray-tracing pipeline compilation in several titles. The improvement impacts how quickly the driver can prepare ray-tracing operations, leading to better overall responsiveness and reduced stutter in games utilizing Vulkan ray-tracing on AMD GPUs.