Intel Vulkan Driver Now Handles PRIME-Style Rendering, Raven Ridge Lands VCN JPEG Decode

With just one week of feature development remaining for the in-development Mesa 18.3, the race is on for landing the remaining feature work ahead of this next quarterly Mesa3D stable version.

Landing overnight is a small addition from Feral Interactive's Alex Smith to allow the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver to present via a different GPU. With a simple two-line patch, Vulkan rendering can happen with an Intel GPU while the contents then presented to a display connected via a Radeon graphics card. Granted, the use-case of rendering with slower Intel graphics hardware and then presenting it on a display connected via a discrete Radeon GPU will be rare, but can be useful for game developers in testing the Intel graphics without having to change display connections.

Happening over in the RadeonSI space was the merging of the VCN JPEG accelerated decoding support for Raven Ridge APUs. When pairing Mesa 18.3 with the latest Linux kernel code, RadeonSI can now utilize JPEG decoding using the "Video Core Next" block on these latest AMD APUs.

Mesa 18.3 feature development is ending next week when the release candidates are set to begin while the Mesa 18.3.0 release should happen around the end of November.