Valve Fixes RAGE 2 Breaking For Recent Mesa RADV Driver

For fans of the RAGE 2 first person shooter game as the sequel to id Software's Rage game from nearly a decade ago, the latest Mesa Git code has landed a fix courtesy of Valve's Linux graphics driver developers to correct the rendering.

While the Rage 2 game exclusively uses the Vulkan API for rendering, it was never ported to Linux. In any event thanks to Steam Play (Proton), it's possible to enjoy this game on Linux. Unfortunately though a fix made to the RADV driver at the start of September around dynamic rendering ended up leading to incorrect rendering. With the latest Mesa 23.1-devel Git code and to be back-ported to Mesa stable releases, there is a fix.

Prominent RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux team devised a new Vulkan layer to fix the rendering issues with RAGE 2. The game itself is incorrectly setting the render area and RADV's switch to dynamic rendering led to problems. So this Vulkan layer integrated into Mesa sets the render area to the frame-buffer dimensions to fix the rendering problems.

See this merge request if interested in more details on the RADV fix for RAGE 2.