Mesa 23.3 Lands Initial Intel Vulkan Driver Sparse Support - Needed For Many Newer Games

Intel engineers have merged to Mesa 23.3 the initial open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver support for sparse resources! This is the important feature needed for running a number of newer Direct3D 12 games with Steam Play (Proton) via VKD3D-Proton with Intel graphics hardware.

The only downside of this Intel Vulkan driver sparse support is that it still will only work with the yet-to-be-merged Intel Xe DRM kernel driver. The Vulkan sparse support isn't working with the default i915 DRM kernel driver but rather the upcoming Xe kernel driver, thus for the time being unless running a patched/experimental kernel build Intel Linux gamers will still be without the sparse support and therefore hitting issues trying to run various newer Windows games on Linux with Intel Arc Graphics.

One of the patches goes on to note the possibility still of i915 having the necessary infrastructure for supporting sparse resources but as of Linux 6.6 there isn't anything wired up for it.

"If we want to support the DX12 API through vkd3d we need to support part of the the Sparse Resources API. If we don't, a bunch of Steam games won't work.

For now we only support the xe.ko backend, but the vast majority of the code is KMD-independent and so an i915.ko implementation would use most of what's here, just extending the part that binds and unbinds memory."

The merge request for Intel ANV Vulkan sparse support notes it will fix a number of games like Resident Evil 4, Street Fighter 6, Elden Ring, Deahtloop, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and others.

The code is merged for the Mesa 23.3 release due out in Q4. Now to hope that the Intel Xe DRM kernel driver will be merged soon at least in experimental/optional form to make it easier for Intel Linux gamers to enjoy the wider array of Windows games with this sparse support long being a blocker.