Intel Lands "Round Robin Strict" Driver Optimization For Helping Battlemage/Xe2

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are busy working to further refine the Xe2 graphics performance for Lunar Lake integrated graphics and the newly-launched Battlemage discrete graphics. Landing in Mesa 25.0-devel this Friday afternoon is a new "Round Robin Strict" optimization to benefit both their OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with Xe2 hardware.

A new Xe2 tuning optimization hitting Mesa is setting the VFG distribution mode to Round Robin Strict "RR_STRICT" for Xe2 and newer. Their performance team found that adjusting the VFG distribution mode can help with some speed-ups on the new Intel graphics processors.

Cited as helping the performance was this change to the Intel Mesa code boosting a Borderlands 3 performance trace by 4%, running Wolfenstein Youngblood was up by 1.5%, and Cyberpunk 2077 was running 0.5% faster. It's also possible other games are helped too but this was just the set of their non-exhaustive tests run. At the end of the day, every little bit helps.

This merge is what lands the change for the Intel ANV Vulkan and Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) drivers.

We'll see what more Intel Xe2 optimizations come in the weeks ahead for their Battlemage graphics with either the OpenGL/Vulkan Mesa driver code or kernel side with their Xe KMD driver. In case you missed it yesterday I ran initial Intel Arc B580 Linux gaming benchmarks and earlier today Arc B580 workstation graphics benchmarks with more tests of Battlemage on Linux forthcoming at Phoronix.