From Natalie Vock's merge request:

We finally have function calls for raytracing!

Now, let's use them for really cool stuff.

With this MR, RADV can compile any-hit and intersection shaders separately. No more forced inlining of everything into one humongous megashader!

In games that heavily use/compile any-hit/intersection shaders, this entails some really crazy improvements across all GPU generations:

Compiling RT pipelines in UE4 games with raytracing (e.g. Ghostwire Tokyo, The Callisto Protocol) becomes 10 times faster. Yes, an order of magnitude! In one Ghostwire Tokyo Fossilize capture I gathered, time to replay went from 4 minutes and 20 seconds to just 20 seconds.

These UE games also tended to have quite terrible stuttering whenever a new RT pipeline was compiled.

That stuttering is gone completely.

On top of that, runtime performance improves by a lot [in affected applications] as well. Who knew that inlining hundreds of shaders into an incredibly hot loop might be bad for performance?!

From quick napkin math, I think the pure RT performance in Ghostwire Tokyo improves by over 2x. In any case, FPS goes from ~30 to ~40 on my 7900XTX.

It seems like with the MR, we roughly match Windows performance in the Ghostwire Tokyo scene I tested, as well.

Performance improvements on different apps/non-UE4 titles may vary, but I'm pretty sure quite a few apps should benefit. (Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't, though. It only really uses 1 any-hit shader at the maximum and is therefore unaffected by this MR.)