Valve Makes RADV Driver More Robust For Gaming With VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness

Thanks to Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux team, the Mesa RADV driver has added support for the VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness Vulkan extension as an efficiency win and will be beneficial for Steam Play gaming.

Since last year with Vulkan 1.3.221 the VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness extension has been around for robust buffer access and other features that can be enabled on a per-pipeline stage basis to help in cutting down on driver overhead.

Joshua Ashton has implemented the RADV support for VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness and has been merged as of Tuesday into Mesa 23.2-devel ahead of that stable version premiering later this quarter. Mesa 23.2 is shaping up to be another significant advancement for the open-source Linux graphics drivers especially for AMD Radeon and Intel hardware.

NVIDIA's proprietary driver has supported the extension since last July. Mesa's V3DV driver has also supported this extension since Mesa 22.3.