Performance-Boosting HiZ Support Lands For Intel's Mesa Vulkan Driver

Intel's "ANV" Mesa Vulkan Linux driver now has basic support for HiZ, an important performance feature.

A while back I wrote about Intel Vulkan driver HiZ patches that were on the mailing list while today they were merged into Mesa Git -- in time for next week's feature freeze for the next Mesa mailing list.

So far Hierarchical-Z is only implemented for basic cases, but in those basic triangle-type Vulkan demos there is about a 15% performance boost and around a 30% performance boost for the demos making use of fast depth clears.

For now the HiZ ANV Vulkan implementation probably won't translate into any real performance gains for Linux's current Vulkan games: Dota 2 and The Talos Princple, but nevertheless great to see the basic support hitting Git.