Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Lands Last Minute HiZ Improvements

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 13 January 2017 at 07:10 AM EST. 2 Comments
MESA
Some more exciting last minute work landing in Mesa Git before this weekend's Mesa 17.0 branching are the potentially performance-improving HiZ work within the Intel Vulkan driver.

For a few months already there has been basic HiZ support in Intel's ANV driver. Hierarchical-Z / HiZ can be a big performance win as shown in past OpenGL tests with the implementations in the different drivers.

The work finished up in Mesa Git now is sampling from HiZ, some performance tweaks, and HiZ support for multiple sub-passes, among other related HiZ work.

Once Mesa 17.0 is branched I'll be running some fresh benchmarks on all the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers so will lookout for performance changes. Among the performance features still needed for the Intel Vulkan driver are multi-sampled/LOD HiZ, compressed multi-sample support, guardband clipping, and soft-pinning. Other Vulkan features like sparse memory, pipeline statistics queries, storage images without format, and other device features are also still to be tackled post-17.0.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week