Intel Vulkan Driver Lands Fix Allowing More Newer & Notable Games To Correctly Render

Landing in Mesa 22.1-devel today for the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver is a fix allowing more modern Windows games running under Steam Play (Proton) to now render correctly with the Intel graphics.

The Intel ANV change landed is just a couple of lines of code to enable the "nir_opt_access" pass for NIR. The change is summed up as, "This commit will enable pass for searching readonly / writeonly access when it's missing. We don't support shaderStorageImageReadWithoutFormat and the optimization pass causes those shaders to take the write-only path which does support formatless."

While the change may not seem exciting for end-users/gamers, it helps out a number of Windows games running on Steam Play with Proton. Games such as Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Rage 2, The Surge 2, Metro Exodus, and DOOM Eternal should now be rendering correctly (or at least better than before) thanks to this change. There are likely various other games benefiting as well from this change of enabling the nir_opt_access pass.

Here is a look at some of the rendering issues seen prior to this patch:

Right now this change is just in Mesa 22.1 Git but is marked for back-porting so it should soon find its way in the Mesa 21.3 and 22.0 series as well for allowing more games to render correctly with Intel's ANV driver. Granted, some of these games may not be too playable with Intel integrated graphics but this change will become all the more important once Intel Arc discrete graphics cards begin shipping in Q2.