RADV Now Supports Experimental VK_EXT_shader_object For RDNA3 GPUs Using NGG

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team recently wrapped up experimental support for the RADV Vulkan driver for EXT_shader_object support using Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) on RDNA3/GFX11 graphics processors.

Using the "RADV_PERFTEST=shader_object" environment variable override there's been experimental support for VK_EXT_shader_object on old GFX6/GFX7/GFX8 and VEGA10 graphics processors. But this latest work merged for Mesa 24.1 now also allows EXT_shader_object support on latest generation RDNA3 (GFX11) graphics processors. The RADV_PERFTEST=shader_object override must still be set for enabling this support on RDNA3.

VK_EXT_shader_object is a big addition to Vulkan rolled out last year that provides a new shader object type to represent a single compiled shader stage as an alternative to Vulkan pipeline objects.

For those on RDNA/RDNA2 graphics hardware, Samuel Pitoiset will be pursuing that next. As noted in the merged code:

"Decided to do GFX11 first because everything is NGG and it's simpler. GFX10/GFX10.3 should be fairly easy to add after that."

Look for this work in Mesa 24.1 due out next quarter.