TURNIP Mesa Vulkan Driver Lands Performance/Power-Helping UBWC Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 22 November 2019 at 02:54 AM EST. 2 Comments
MESA
Universal Bandwidth Compression is now enabled for the open-source "TURNIP" Mesa Vulkan driver.

TURNIP is the open-source Vulkan driver being written around Qualcomm Adreno hardware as part of the "Freedreno" umbrella. With the Freedreno Gallium3D driver in good shape already for OpenGL support across multiple generations of Adreno graphics processors, TURNIP is of growing work by the developers involved -- primarily from Google -- in advancing this Vulkan driver support.

During the back-half of this year TURNIP activity picked up and seeing new features like MSAA and now UBWC.

UBWC is a performance feature already wired in for Freedreno OpenGL and is "Universal Bandwidth Compression." UBWC helps reduce memory bandwidth usage thanks to buffer compression and can help with memory power savings and possible performance benefits.

With this commit to Mesa 20.0-devel, UBWC is now enabled for this open-source Qualcomm Vulkan driver. The exception right now is UBWC not being enabled for 3D textures. This work was done by Freedreno contributor Jonathan Marek.
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