Intel Arc Graphics Enjoy Another Open-Source Vulkan Driver Performance Optimization
The two month old merge request is around supporting copy/clear MSAA images over the compute queue. This work though does depend upon more recent GuC firmware for enabling async compute queue support and also needing to enable the compute queue support with the INTEL_COMPUTE_CLASS environment variable. That environment variable will be dropped once it can be assumed that all Linux users are on a capable GuC firmware version or otherwise having the ability to more easily query that information.
Some tests shown in the now-merged merge request show off some nice gains for Linux gaming with Intel Arc Graphics:
F1 22, Strange Brigade, Borderlands 3, Dota 2, and other games are benefiting from this set of patches that have been merged for Mesa 23.3. It's sure been nice seeing the many Intel open-source Linux graphics driver improvements to come about this summer. One of the big milestones we are currently still waiting on is for the experimental Intel Xe kernel driver to be upstreamed as an alternative to the i915 kernel driver. The Intel Xe driver still hasn't been made it upstream as of the v6.6 kernel cycle but hopefully we'll see it land in the months ahead as an optional and initially experimental alternative driver for Arc Graphics customers on Linux.
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