RADV Enables Variable Rate Shading For RDNA3, RadeonSI Lands More Fixes

If you are an AMD Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" GPU owner and don't mind running bleeding-edge open-source graphics driver code, you'll want to pull down today's Mesa 23.1-devel Git snapshot.

There's been more RDNA3 improvements to land in the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. First up, thanks to Valve's Samuel Pitoiset there is Vulkan variable rate shading (VRS) support enabled finally for RDNA3 GPUs. The VRS support is now in good enough shape for GFX11 hardware that the Vulkan KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension is now enabled for these latest GPUs. Previously RADV was just exposing Vulkan variable rate shading -- a popular feature for gaming -- just on RDNA2 GPUs.

This merge request added the GFX11 VRS support with a simple message of: "It's now working!"

Separately, well known AMD open-source Mesa developer Marek Olšák has landed a number of fixes/improvements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. This merge of 13 patches has some GFX11 (RDNA3) fixes as well as other clean-ups. This includes changes such as increasing the Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) workgroup size and other improvements.

Exciting work for the open-source AMD (and Intel) graphics stack continue to grow in Mesa 23.1 ahead of the feature freeze and subsequent release later in Q2.