Intel's Linux Vulkan Driver Adds Fragment Shading Rate Support

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has finally merged support for the KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension.

Introduced last October with Vulkan 1.2.158 was this fragment shading rate extension for changing the rate at which certain fragments are shaded. The fragment shading rate with this extension can be manipulated on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region manner. Use of this fragment shading rate extension can be used by Vulkan-powered games for shading higher levels of detail in a scene compared to others or rather less important areas at a lower quality shading in select areas of the scene.

The Vulkan KHR_fragment_shading_rate extension can be quite beneficial in high resolution rendering scenarios as well as areas like XR/VR rendering for more control over the quality/performance trade-off based upon the area being rendered.

NVIDIA was first to release a supported Linux driver for VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate followed by RADV adding the extension later in the year along with AMDVLK support.

For the Intel driver there has been this merge request open the past five months. On Sunday the code was finally merged to Mesa 21.2-devel making it part of the next Mesa3D quarterly feature release.