Work-In-Progress RadeonSI+Nine Showing Big Performance Win For Source Engine Games

While Valve has been working on Vulkan-based rendering for Source Engine games by making use of DXVK for translating the game engine's native Direct3D calls to the Vulkan API, with some yet-to-be-merged Mesa patches around Gallium Nine there is much better performance to see with Gallium Nine at least for the RadeonSI driver.

Mike Blumenkrantz as the Valve contractor who has been working heavily on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan has been hacking on some Gallium Nine related patches on and off the past week along with others involved with Mesa and Valve's Linux graphics driver work.

While not yet ironed out and mainlined, their quest has been about getting DXVK-compatible Source Engine games running through Gallium's Nine state tracker. In the case of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with an unspecified graphics card, when switching to this new approach the performance went up from around 445 FPS using the default ToGL-based implementation to 933 FPS with the in-development work. (Update: For added clarity, it turns out the initial tests were using ToGL and not the newer DXVK/Vulkan path.)

More details on this tentative effort via Mike's blog.