The Open-Source Qualcomm "TURNIP" Vulkan Driver Adds Important Performance Feature

The TURNIP Mesa Vulkan driver providing support for recent Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors and akin to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver has added an important performance-boosting feature.

Thanks to Jonathan Marek who has been driving much of the TURNIP driver advancements in recent time is now hardware binning support. The nearly 400 lines of code implement hardware binning as an important performance sensitive feature.

No performance numbers were shared as part of this TURNIP driver commit to Mesa 20.0, but if going by when Freedreno added hardware binning for Adreno 600 series with that OpenGL driver, it yielded 20~30% better performance for games like Xonotic and SuperTuxKart. At least for geometry-heavy Vulkan workloads, this TURNIP hardware binning should yield a big performance boost.

Great seeing all the work happening to TURNIP and Freedreno thanks primarily to Google who is even using the open-source Qualcomm GPU driver code on various devices in different capacities.