Intel ANV Receives A ~24% Performance Boost For Older Hardware With Zink + Sauerbraten

It's not exactly the most applicable configuration for hardware and software, but a 24% performance boost is nothing to sneeze at... A 24% performance boost when for an open-source game when using the Intel ANV Vulkan driver with older Gen8 Broadwell or Gen9 Skylake graphics while using the Zink layer.

Emma Anholt has landed a fix to the Intel ANV driver for enhancing the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan performance when using older Gen8 "Broadwell" and Gen9 "Skylake" era integrated graphics.

The change around the VB range handling was merged for Mesa 23.1:

Perf results with zink+anv on my [Intel Coffee Lake system]:

sauerbraten: +24.8182% +/- 0.602077% (n=5)
portal-2-v2.trace: +4.64289% +/- 0.285285% (n=5)

Not bad for reworking about a dozen lines of code. It will be interesting to see what other games may stand to benefit as well besides Portal 2 and Cube 2: Sauerbraten.

Cube and Cube 2: Sauerbraten surely bring back plenty of memories for long-time open-source/Linux gamers. Sadly it's been since late 2020 since the last Sauerbraten release.