Intel Vulkan Driver Lands Major Performance Boost, RADV Lands GPU Hang Fixes

It's yet another exciting afternoon in Mesa Git world for both of the mainline Vulkan drivers: the Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver and the unofficial "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver.

For the Intel Vulkan driver, the batch of commits hitting mainline a short time ago are the changes for doing re-locations in user-space, which leads to around a 30% performance boost at least for Skylake hardware with Dota 2 while Talos Principle should see similar boosts. Great to see that code going mainline and will have some fresh Intel Vulkan benchmarks shortly.

Then within the RADV driver today is enabling conditional discard optimizations while prior to that it was adding the optimization for NIR. Enabling this is said to fix "a bunch of GPU hangs" brought around by some conformance test cases for Vulkan. This optimization is a candidate for backporting to Mesa 13.0 given it fixes hangs/bugs.

Fresh open-source Vulkan Linux benchmarks coming up soon on Phoronix.