Mesa Zink Change Leads To 50% Reduction In Memory Utilization

A rather profound change is pending for Mesa 23.1 that should lead to this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver's memory utilization being cut in half for most games without negatively impacting the performance and likely closing a number of bugs in the process.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team recently took to looking at serializing all NIR while hunting down excessive RAM usage experience with Zink. This is along similar lines to a RADV driver change to lower system RAM use for some games that was taken care of at the end of March.

With a new merge request for Zink to serialize all NIR, Blumenkrantz sums it up as:

"this cuts driver memory utilization by over 50% in most games with no perf implications

probably fixes #8699 #8328 #6024"

It's great to see and he also published a blog post with more details of that bug hunting adventure to uncovering the previously heavy RAM use.

This change should be merged to Git soon in time for this quarter's Mesa 23.1 release.