Mesa 23.1 RADV Gets Vulkan Mesh/Task Shaders Working For AMD RDNA3 GPUs

Thanks to the work of Timur Kristóf on Valve's Linux graphics driver team, the RADV driver in Mesa 23.1 this morning received support for Vulkan mesh and task shaders for Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics processors.

Back in December RADV with Mesa 23.0 added Vulkan mesh shaders for Radeon RX 6000 series "RDNA2" GPUs. After additional work by Valve's Linux graphics experts, the mesh shader and task shader support is now in good shape and working for the latest Radeon RX 7000 series RDNA3 hardware.

14 patches via this merge request enabled the mesh and task shaders for GFX11/RDNA3=. The initial implementation makes use of the driver's legacy fast launch mode. All of the relevant Vulkan mesh shader CTS test cases are passing. Future work planned include using the new fast launch mode, mesh shader queries, and optimizations.

VK_EXT_mesh_shader as the cross-vendor mesh shading for Vulkan support is an alternative to the geometry rasterization pipeline and aims to improve compatibility with DirectX 12 atop Vulkan workflows like with VKD3D-Proton. More details on Vulkan mesh shading can be found via the Vulkanised 2023 Munich presentation by Timur that is embedded below.

Mesa 23.1 should be out in May~June with the mesh shader support for AMD RNDA3 GPU owners along with many other OpenGL and Vulkan driver improvements.