RADV Vulkan Driver Gets Minor CPU Overhead Reductions, Conditional Rendering Patches

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team has been particularly busy in recent days with "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver enhancements.

Pitoiset this weekend sent out patches for enabling the new VK_KHR_create_renderpass2 extension, which was introduced in Saturday's release of Vulkan 1.1.80. RenderPass2 allows for render passes to be easily extended.

Now this morning across 4 patches are support for conditional rendering, another new extension of Vulkan 1.1.80, that allows making rendering to be conditional based upon a value in buffer memory and to otherwise discard the subsequent rendering commands, to avoid having to stall the rendering to wait on the application/engine. This support is exposed by the new VK_EXT_conditional_rendering extension.

Meanwhile, hitting Mesa 18.2 Git today are some CPU overhead reductions in the form of lower overhead when flushing descriptors and possibly lower CPU overhead when using RADV_TRACE_FILE.

Great work all around thanks to Valve, AMD, and other stakeholders.