Intel's Open-Source Vulkan Driver Lands Another Small Performance Optimization

Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver has received another small but measurable performance improvement for various games.

Landing today in Mesa 23.2-devel was the merge request for supporting Intel fast clears with vkCmdClearAttachments.

With this merge request when running with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver atop there is just under a one percent improvement for running Valve's Portal 2 game. Or when running Strange Brigade via Steam Play with the native Vulkan renderer is around a 4% improvement as noted by one commenter. Other games are likely to benefit as well with this expanded fast clears coverage albeit the testing on this particular merge request was limited.

Intel's Mesa Vulkan driver has already supported fast clears under various conditions while now supporting fast clears on vkCmdClearAttachments is providing some additional albeit minor gains.

Now if only the Intel ANV driver would finish up its work on sparse support for getting additional modern Steam Play games running nicely with Arc Graphics on this open-source driver stack...