RADV Radeon Driver Lands NGG Culling Support As Another Performance Win

Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has landed support for Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) culling support as ultimately what should provide another performance win for some workloads.

Building off prior Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) work within RADV, NGG-based culling support was merged on Tuesday night. NGG culling should help with performance for Navi 1x/2x GPUs that sport NGG.

As of now, NGG culling isn't enabled by default but requires setting the "RADV_PERFTEST=nggc" environment variable for the RADV Vulkan driver to make use of this NGG-powered removal of unneeded triangles during rendering.

The RADV implementation at this time supports NGG culling for vertex and tessellation eval shaders, triangle-based primitive topologies, and supports three different culling algorithms.

More details on this initial RADV NGG culling support via this merge request by Timur Kristóf. I'll have out fresh RADV benchmarks with NGG culling published later this week on Phoronix.