Intel Lands Vulkan Sparse Binding Support For ANV+i915 With Mesa 24.0

The most significant limitation of Intel Arc Graphics on Linux with the existing open-source driver stack has been the lack of sparse resources support that is needed for many newer games to work via Steam Play on Linux. Intel has a proper solution in place with their yet-to-be-merged Xe kernel driver while now for Mesa 24.0 their ANV Vulkan driver has landed an implementation that works with the existing i915 kernel driver.

As written about last month, Intel Linux engineers devised a way for Vulkan sparse support for ANV with the i915 kernel driver by making use of the Tiled Resources Translation Table (TR-TT) with Gen12 graphics hardware and newer. TR-TT pre-processes graphics virtual addresses to a new graphics virtual memory address or otherwise to a null tile. The code for this implementation was finally merged today for Mesa 24.0 Git.

This sparse support unblocks many newer games from being able to run with Arc Graphics on Linux like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Street Fighter 6, Elden Ring, and many others. This TR-TT solution works for both the i915 and Xe kernel drivers.

The TR-TT sparse bindings for Intel Gen12+ graphics has been under review for the past month but minutes ago was merged into what will be released as Mesa 24.0 next quarter. The finalized implementation amounted to 20 patches and more than one thousand new lines of code within Mesa. Great seeing this come about with still waiting on the Xe DRM kernel driver to be upstreamed into the mainline Linux tree... Hopefully that will happen soon at least in experimental form to allow more Linux gamers and enthusiasts the ability to more easily try out this new kernel driver solution.