RADV Driver Sees Dramatic Improvement To Reduce CPU Overhead For Draw Calls

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RADV Driver Sees Dramatic Improvement To Reduce CPU Overhead For Draw Calls

Mike Blumenkrantz has been working under contract for Valve on the open-source Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation for Mesa but that work has carried over into the Mesa Vulkan drivers too where there is common overlap. His recent work has been focused on lowering the CPU overhead of some operations with the RADV Vulkan driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Lower-Draw-CPU-Overhead

[commodore256]

So, is running OpenGL through Vulkan now faster than the direct OpenGL drivers?

[user1]

Nice, even if AMDGPU-pro was a bit faster in that simple test, it was still slower in games than Radv most of the time.
However, I would say one area of Radv that is a bit lacking is MSAA performance. I noticed that among the games I run on Proton+DXVK, those who don't use MSAA are faster than native DX11 on Windows. But those who do use MSAA are slower than on Windows. Over the years I've seen 1 or 2 bug reports regarding low MSAA performance with Radv, but those were about specific games. I think it may still have some room for improvement.

[V1tol]

Too bad those patches do not apply cleanly over 22.1.7 or 22.2.0-rc3.

[juxuanu]

Hopefully we will get some benchmarks ;-)

[aleksamagicka]

The blog post made my day

[theriddick]

Will certainly help some titles which suffer draw call hell like Star Citizen (I think this game calls the most in the industry atm, lmao)

[jorgepl]

That must be a nice improvement for the Steam Deck! Especially on CPU-constrained scenarios (which will be much more common in the future)

[marlock]

it seems Valve has hit a sweetspot of synergies between working on their own games and their platform and improving linux as a whole...

working upstream helps gain insight into performance issues and optimization opportunities for their games (and everyone else's) and steam (app, deck, etc) while working on their game-specific and gaming-related issues helps provide insight into upstream issues and optimization opportunities

This seems to be an unrelated issue and by a different actor with a different immediate goal, but both news seen together paint a pretty compelling picture:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Faster-CS-GO-Startup

[ridge]

Every morning, I wake up and walk up to my nearest mirror and repeat after my reflection three times, "The flavour (of winning), the atmosphere (of being a winner), the experience (of being #1)"