Raspberry Pi OpenGL Driver Seeing Faster Blit Support Come Mesa 21.0

Raspberry Pi's V3DV Vulkan driver is on quite a streak lately. The V3DV driver has seen inclusion in Mesa 20.3, Vulkan 1.0 conformance, and Wayland support, more performance work is being pursued with those initial milestones reached. Meanwhile the V3D OpenGL driver is also being improved upon still.

A new optimization hitting Mesa 21.0 is supporting a tile-based blit fast path. This new fast path for blitting is making use of the tile-buffer hardware. The tile-buffer hardware can also handle multi-sampling resolve in some cases as another gain over the current blitter support.

All in, the new code that was merged on Wednesday to Mesa 21.0 should provide some minor but measurable speed advantages during blitting operations. The old tile blit code based on the VC4 driver support was removed.

Mesa 21.0 isn't due for release until March and the feature freeze will likely be around early February, so there still is time to see more optimizations for V3D/V3DV and the other open-source drivers.