Mesa 24.3 Delivers Big Performance Win For Aging AMD Navi 10 GPUs

The upcoming Mesa 24.3 graphics driver stack will deliver a very nice performance win with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for aging RDNA1 "GFX10" graphics processors.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has enabled Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" culling support by default for RDNA 1 graphics hardware. Timur explained in the merge request:

"This is an early Black Friday gift for Navi 10 users.
...
We never took the time to actually test this, but it works fine.

Note that even when NGG culling was originally implemented, we never found any game that regressed on Navi 10; we just didn't enable it becuase it didn't yield such a big perf improvement as it did on Navi 21; and we never took the time to revisit that. Better late than never!"

Some of the performance gains are pretty wild. For RDNA 1 graphics the game Baldur's Gate 3 is around 10% faster, Witcher 3 is around 4% faster, some sample / stress test apps are 57~107% faster, etc. This code is in Mesa 24.3-devel as of this morning.

Some very nice wins for Navi 10 in the Radeon RX 5000 series of GPUs.

The currently committed code leavs NGG culling disabled by default for Navi 14. The NGG culling override can be forced on existing Mesa releases if desired using the "RADV_PERFTEST=nggc" environment variable override. The Mesa 24.3 stable release is expected to be out later this quarter. Mesa 24.3-rc1 was supposed to be out last week and the code branched, but is running behind and this cycle will likely see the usual release management woes.