RADV Vulkan Driver Enables Fragment Shading Rate Support - Limited To GFX10.3 (RDNA 2)

The latest Vulkan extension now supported by Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is support for the new VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate.

VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate is an interesting extension and sure to be of interest for game developers. The extension allows changing the rate dynamically at which fragments are shaded. The fragment shading rate can be tuned on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region basis. This extension can help in allowing games to provide higher levels of detail in a scene compared to other less important areas of the screen.

NVIDIA has been extending it and making use of it already within their Vulkan beta drivers on Windows and Linux. Now with Mesa 21.0 Git the RADV driver has VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate support.

The merged code hit Mesa today. Though this Vulkan fragment shading rate support only works on GFX10.3 (RDNA 2) and newer, thus out of luck for those not yet on a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card.