Radeon Vulkan Driver Lands Dynamic VRS To Help With Power Savings - Helps The Steam Deck

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon Vulkan Driver Lands Dynamic VRS To Help With Power Savings - Helps The Steam Deck

Back in January I wrote how Valve is working on dynamic Variable Rate Shading (VRS) for the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to dynamically control the shading performance to help with battery life. That work has now successfully been merged into Mesa 22.1 for the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-Dynamic-VRS-Lands

[obri]

That is really a nice way from Valve to improve things for the deck.

Now I just hope for incoming optimizations for Raytraycing in RADV, as I am since a few days an owner of a 6800 XT.

[darkbasic]

Do you think that other compositors like Mutter or KWin will eventually embrace AMD FSR?

[Devorlon]

Do you think that other compositors like Mutter or KWin will eventually embrace AMD FSR?

FSR is for image upscaling. I don't see why you would want to implement something like that directly into a compositor. Especially when it's already built directly into more appropriate things (gamescope, game engines etc).

[skeevy420]

FSR is for image upscaling. I don't see why you would want to implement something like that directly into a compositor. Especially when it's already built directly into more appropriate things (gamescope, game engines etc).

Accessibility like zooming in a lot with screen viewers/magnifiers. Using the mouse wheel to increase the size of thumbnails. Perhaps cheaper effects like shadows and transparency at 4K+?

[user1]

Speaking of VRS, I recently stumbled upon this draft. Maybe I didn't understand it correctly, but it sounds like it's about enabling VRS by default in a certain case on all RDNA 2.0 hardware. Maybe someone can elaborate on this?

[Leopard]

That is really a nice way from Valve to improve things for the deck.

Now I just hope for incoming optimizations for Raytraycing in RADV, as I am since a few days an owner of a 6800 XT.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15030

You can try this MR.

[darkbasic]

FSR is for image upscaling. I don't see why you would want to implement something like that directly into a compositor. Especially when it's already built directly into more appropriate things (gamescope, game engines etc).

Because I don't want to use gamescope as my desktop compositor and because the vast majority of game engines don't support it, especially the ones where it would be most useful. Think of old games which run on low resolutions: it would allow to render the game at whatever resolution its engine was built for while still running your monitor at the native resolution, without awful interpolation artifacts.

[darkbasic]

By the way it looks like sway/wlroots/gamescope author thinks the same about the importance of implementing these features into traditional compositors: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gamin...n_via/h6kkylm/

[jntesteves]

Accessibility like zooming in a lot with screen viewers/magnifiers. Using the mouse wheel to increase the size of thumbnails. Perhaps cheaper effects like shadows and transparency at 4K+?

FSR isn't particularly great for upscaling text, in my opinion. I think KWin already uses their own shader they developed specifically for the screen magnifier, called Reverse Anti-Aliasing (rAA): https://kdepepo.wordpress.com/2012/0...image-scaling/