Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Lands Last Minute HiZ Improvements

Some more exciting last minute work landing in Mesa Git before this weekend's Mesa 17.0 branching are the potentially performance-improving HiZ work within the Intel Vulkan driver.

For a few months already there has been basic HiZ support in Intel's ANV driver. Hierarchical-Z / HiZ can be a big performance win as shown in past OpenGL tests with the implementations in the different drivers.

The work finished up in Mesa Git now is sampling from HiZ, some performance tweaks, and HiZ support for multiple sub-passes, among other related HiZ work.

Once Mesa 17.0 is branched I'll be running some fresh benchmarks on all the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers so will lookout for performance changes. Among the performance features still needed for the Intel Vulkan driver are multi-sampled/LOD HiZ, compressed multi-sample support, guardband clipping, and soft-pinning. Other Vulkan features like sparse memory, pipeline statistics queries, storage images without format, and other device features are also still to be tackled post-17.0.