Intel NIR Optimizations Land In Mesa 18.2 That Help Skyrim With DXVK

A few days back I wrote about some Intel open-source Vulkan "ANV" driver optimizations that really help the Skyrim game under DXVK with Wine to allow for a playable experience with Intel onboard graphics. Those patches have now been merged into Mesa 18.2.

Jason Ekstrand works out NIR optimizations around uniform buffer objects (UBOs) and found that it allowed the Skyrim Special Edition game under Wine with the DXVK D3D11-over-Vulkan translation layer to go from running the game at a snail's pace to something that is actually playable with Skylake-class hardware.

As of minutes ago, the work was merged into mainline Mesa Git for the August release of Mesa 18.2.0. Intel developer Jason Ekstrand commented, "this shaves 99.6% of the run time off of the ambient occlusion pass in Skyrim Special Edition when running under DXVK and shaves 92% off the runtime for a reasonably representative frame. When running the actual game, Skyrim goes from being a slide-show to a very stable and playable framerate on my SKL GT4e machine. "

The GT4e hardware for reference is the Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580, but will be interesting to see how well the game and other Vulkan-enabled software works on the more common Intel HD/UHD hardware.