Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Lands Color Compression Support For Skylake

It's been another busy day in Mesa Git for Intel's "ANV" Vulkan open-source Linux driver.

Just yesterday I was writing about a lot of new code hitting Mesa Git for the Intel Vulkan driver along with new feature patches on the mailing list. Today there's been a number of other ANV driver commits to mainline.

After a lot of prep work patches, there is now initial support for color compression with Skylake "Gen9" graphics hardware and newer. There is more work left to accomplish though, as explained by Intel OTC developer Jason Ekstrand, "This commit adds basic support for color compression. For the moment, color compression is only enabled within a render pass and a full resolve is done before the render pass finishes. All texturing operations still happen with CCS disabled."

But with all of the latest Git activity, the work was enough to mark render buffer compression off their TODO list. The patches don't state whether any performance improvements can be expected from this initial color compression support.

Head on over to the Mesa Git viewer to see the latest activity. I'll be running some fresh Intel Vulkan Linux benchmarks from Mesa Git shortly compared to RADV and AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan.