Performance-Boosting HiZ Patches Revised For Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver

A revised set of 11 patches were published this week for implementing basic HiZ (Hierarchical Z) support within Intel's open-source Vulkan "ANV" Mesa driver.

These patches don't yet enable HiZ for all cases, but currently just for basic ones. With this basic support, enabling rendering to HiZ increases the FPS by about ~15% on basic triangle and multi-sampling demos. When enabling fast depth clears, it's about an additional 30% frame-rate gains for these triangle and multi-sampling Vulkan demos.

These patches are a great start but not until the rest of the HiZ support is squared away will we probably see any significant benefit in the Vulkan Linux games like Dota 2 and Talos Principle.