Valve Developer Lands VK_EXT_global_priority For RADV Vulkan Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 21 October 2017 at 07:04 AM EDT. 2 Comments
RADEON
Squeezing into Mesa Git ahead of the Mesa 17.3 branching is support for the EXT_global_priority extension within the RADV Vulkan driver.

Valve graphics driver developer Andres Rodriguez has merged support for VK_EXT_global_priority into RADV. This global priority extension is what's used by SteamVR to generate reprojected frames when an application falls behind in the rendering process. EXT_global_priority allows for allocating queues with latency guarantees regardless of system load.

VK_EXT_global_priority was just merged recently in Vulkan 1.0.63 with Valve developers having created this extension for their virtual reality (VR) use-cases.


RADV's global priority support depends upon the new priority scheduler support within the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver. That scheduling support is landing with Linux 4.15. Valve's Andres Rodriguez and others have been working on this priority scheduling support for AMDGPU+RADV for almost one year now for ensuring the driver can always keep up with performance and not get any VR gamers sick if failing to deliver predictable performance.
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