Fake Sparse Support Merged For Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver To Make More Games Playable

Preventing some modern Windows games from running on Intel Arc Graphics under Linux with Valve's Steam Play has been held up by lack of sparse support within Intel's ANV Vulkan driver. Those limitations will hopefully be overcome with the Intel Xe kernel mode driver when that is mainlined in hopefully the coming months, but for now it's a bit of a sore spot for Intel Linux gamers. A partial workaround though has now been merged for Mesa 23.3 with fake sparse support.

As covered last month on Phoronix, fake sparse support for the Intel ANV driver was devised for helping with some DirectX 12 Windows games that require sparse resource support but don't actually make use of sparse resources. This faked support for the Intel driver in turn is able to get some games working that require the sparse support but not utilizing sparse resources.

As this won't work for games actually utilizing sparse resources, the fake support is only advertised when the "fake_sparse=true" environment variable is set or on a per-game basis with the DriConf option handling.

The initial game that this is known to fix on Intel graphics is Elden Ring and is already white-listed as part of the DriConf overrides. Now that this support is merged, we'll see among community testing what other games may be helped by this fake_sparse=true workaround.

The Intel ANV code made it this afternoon to Mesa 23.3 Git via this MR. Mesa 23.3 stable will be out in Q4.