Intel's Vulkan Driver To Lower CPU Overhead With Mesa 20.0

A patch series was merged today for the in-development Mesa 20.0 to further lower the CPU overhead of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver.

Lead Intel "ANV" driver developer Jason Ekstrand merged the 15 commits focused on CPU overhead reductions. These reductions come after analyzing traces from rapid bind-and-draw benchmarks and seeing that the binding tables and push constants were in the hottest of hot paths.

Ekstrand commented in the merge request, "It's a bit of a long and winding path but the final patch is the kingpin. With that we can avoid re-emitting binding tables and push constants in several cases when there is a pipeline change that doesn't change everything. For instance, if someone binds a pipeline with the same shaders but different depth/stencil settings, we can now detect that nothing has changed in the bind map or push constant setup and just go ahead with the pipeline."

Among the patches are a rework of push constant handling, more carefully dirtying state, and other optimizations in the name of reducing CPU overhead for this Intel Vulkan Linux driver.

Mesa 20.0 with these patches and more should be out around the end of February.