Intel's Vulkan Driver Lands More Patches To Help Reduce CPU Overhead

A set of 12 patches adding 720 lines of new code and removing 222 lines of existing code to Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver have been merged for Mesa 22.3 to help reduce the Vulkan push descriptor CPU overhead.

As part of analyzing the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan Gallium3D performance when running GFXBench and finding its performance lower than the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver, the Vulkan push descriptor overhead was explored. The push descriptor overhead was analyzed using VKOverhead, the Vulkan micro-benchmarks worked on by Mike Blumenkrantz as part of his Zink/Vulkan optimization push.

Intel engineer Lionel Landwerlin worked on this ANV driver patch series to help reduce the CPU overhead for their Vulkan Linux driver.To the VKOverhead micro-benchmarks Lionel is finding some nice wins. He previously found as much as a 30% improvement for his original performance analysis though currently seems unable to reproduce that original jump in performance.

Those interested in the Vulkan driver overhead reduction work can find this merge request now in Mesa 22.3 with all the details.