Mesa's RADV Driver Lands Workaround For Flickering Issue With F1 2021

For those wanting to enjoy the F1 2021 racing game on Linux via Valve's Steam Play, it's slowly getting into good shape. The latest enhancement is on the Radeon Vulkan driver side with Mesa's RADV adding a workaround targeting the game.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed a workaround in Mesa 22.0-devel Git (and also marked for back-porting to Mesa 21.3 stable) for fixing severe flickering issues exhibited by F1 2021 within the in-game menus. Here's a screenshot shared by Pitoiset:

With Valve's upcoming Steam Deck using the RADV driver and experiences like these being undesirable, expect more driver fixes/workarounds to come. In the case of this F1 2021 flickering workaround a new DriConf option of "radv_disable_htile_layers" is introduced and then enabled for the F1 2021 binary name (F1_2021_dx12.exe).

Aside from going to Mesa 22.0 or waiting for a Mesa 21.3 point release with this workaround, an immediate workaround can be setting the RADV_DEBUG=nohiz environment variable for disabling HiZ to also avoid the flickering. The issue and RADV workaround are detailed in this VKD3D-Proton ticket. The workaround was merged on Friday.

ProtonDB currently rates F1 2021 on Linux via Steam Play as a "silver" class. With the latest software bits there still are some issues, but at least it's improving compared to earlier on when the racing game first debuted. Soon enough it's looking like F1 2021 will be good enough to use for benchmarking where as to now due to outstanding issues have kept to using F1 2020 in Linux GPU/driver benchmarks.