Intel's Linux Vulkan Driver Lands Workaround For HITMAN 3

Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 work on Linux if you are running the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa. The gaming experience is decent aside from occasional driver issues. One of the games that has been pesky with the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver has been the HITMAN 3 title running under Steam Play but with the newest Mesa 22.3 code should now be fixed up.

Intel has landed a HITMAN 3 specific workaround in their Intel ANV Mesa driver to deal with invalid invalid image storage formats. Up to now running HITMAN 3 with the Intel Vulkan Linux driver would lead to a black screen at launch and possible driver crash with accessing uninitialized memory. This happens for Intel integrated graphics too but primarily of interest to the new Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs with having enough power for running many modern game titles.

HITMAN 3 has been running on Linux via Steam Play but an Intel ANV driver issue led to a black screen and/or driver crash.

This merge implements a Vulkan layer for dealing with the HITMAN 3 behavior and is enough to now get HITMAN 3 running nicely under Proton Experimental with the Intel open-source graphics driver. Look for this change to appear in Mesa 22.3 stable with its debut around December. Perhaps it will get backported to Mesa 22.2 as well for improving the Intel Linux gaming experience in shorter time for those new Arc Graphics powered gamers.

See my Intel Arc A750 + A770 Linux review for more details on the open-source driver state for these DG2/Alchemist GPUs. More benchmarks coming.