Mesa's Venus Vulkan Driver Gets A Very Sizable Speed-Up

Venus as the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver within Mesa and developed by Google engineers just received a nice speed-up.

Merged to Mesa 22.2 was adding event and fence feedback support to this driver. This was done as part of optimizing the polling of fence, event, timeline semaphore, and query handling within this virtual driver.

With these feedback interfaces, the Venus drivr is seeing very significant speed-ups going from around 93% the performance of the native OpenGL driver performance to now as much as 165% the performance when using the new Venus driver code. The OpenGL support here atop Vulkan was done using Google's ANGLE. Even in the "lower end" of the performance gains are going from around 49% up to 91% of the native hardware driver OpenGL performance when using the RADV driver.

This new Venus code should yield better performance ofr any Vulkan software making use of VkEvent. Venus developers plan to get timeline semaphore and query pool support implemented next for this VirtIO-GPU open-source Vulkan driver.

More details within this MR that was merged yesterday into Mesa 22.2.