RADV Vulkan Driver Implements Smooth Lines For Zink

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has implemented smooth lines support for in turn to be leveraged by the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

Prolific RADV developer Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team has implemented the smooth lines handling. Pitoiset commented in the merge, "This is pretty annoying because it's needed to lower using the sample coverage and everything can be dynamic basically with ds3/gpl. This is for Zink."

This Vulkan smoothLines support is part of the VK_EXT_line_rasterization extension, which was introduced back in 2019 and provides some line rasterization features commonly used in CAD applications and available directly with OpenGL. Going back to 2020, RADV began working on VK_EXT_line_rasterization support but was missing out on the smooth lines functionality until now.

This two month old merge request was committed today to Mesa 23.2-devel as another step up for RADV and Zink thanks to Valve's talent.