Sparse Mapping Improvements Help Radeon RADV Driver With Some Games

Adding to the growing list of Mesa 22.0 features are more Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvements to help with gaming performance.

Samuel Pitoiset who for years now has been working on Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver improvements has merged a set of sparse mapping improvements for RADV. These sparse mapping improvements to the RADV winsys code in Mesa 22.0 should help with the performance for at least some games.

Pitoiset found the improvements when optimizing the game Deathloop running on Steam Play. Another game found to benefit is Forza's Horizon 5 running under Steam Play on Linux. Other games are likely to benefit too.

Forza Horizon 5

This MR was merged into Mesa 22.0-devel yesterday, so if you are a habitual user of Mesa Git with building from source or using third-party builds like Oibaf PPA, it may be time to fetch the latest code. This sparse mapping work is just among a flurry of interesting activity recently in Mesa Git with Valve's developers continuing to land more optimizations ahead of the Steam Deck shipping, various clean-ups and optimizations at large following the removal of Mesa's classic driver code, and just the never-ending excitement when it comes to open-source GPU drivers.