RADV Driver Lands Support For Vulkan Extended Dynamic State

The newest addition to Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver is support for the recently published VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state extension.

VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state debuted in late June with Vulkan 1.2.145 as an extension developed by the likes of Valve, Intel, NVIDIA, Google, AMD, and others. VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state adds additional dynamic state for accommodating games/applications needing to reduce the number of pipeline state objects they compile and bind. The details are laid out in full via the Khronos spec.

VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state is an important extension in allowing for more flexibility of Vulkan pipelines. The extension is important for the likes of DXVK, OpenGL on Vulkan, and similar projects. More background information on this extended dynamic state extension via this blog post by Ricardo Garcia.

Projects like the Yuzu emulator for the Nintendo Switch have already begun to make use of the new extension to allow a reduction in the number of cached pipelines and the size of the pipeline key.

RADV on Mesa 20.2 Git joins the likes of NVIDIA's latest Vulkan beta driver in supporting this important extension moving forward.

Cheers to Valve's Samuel Pitoiset in getting the support merged for RADV ahead of the Mesa 20.2 feature freeze later this month and the official Mesa 20.2 debut around the end of August.