Mesa's NVK Vulkan Driver Lands A Pipeline Shader Cache

The latest notable feature addition for Mesa 24.0 worth mentioning is to NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver for providing increasingly robust Vulkan API support on this alternative to NVIDIA's proprietary graphics driver.

Merged today for the NVK Vulkan driver is a working pipeline shader cache to help in reusing cached shaders rather than constantly having to recompile them, which can affect game load times and in some cases the overall in-game performance.

Open-source contributor Thomas Andersen has been working on this NVK pipeline shader cache support the past few months, inspired in part by the shader caches of other Mesa drivers.

As expected, this pipeline shader cache is yielding much quicker times for dEQP tests around the Vulkan pipeline caching test cases:

See this merge request for more details around this pipeline shader cache functionality to be found in NVK for Mesa 24.0 stable later this quarter.