Turnip Vulkan Driver Picks Up Geometry Streams To Support DXVK's Direct3D 10.1

We haven't heard much of traditional Linux gaming on any ARM-powered Qualcomm notebooks as it would rely on the likes of Hangover for running Windows x86_64 games on ARM, but the Turnip Vulkan driver within Mesa has a necessary feature for now being able to run DXVK with the Direct3D 10_1 (v10.1) feature level.

Long-standing Mesa contributor Connor Abbott has added support for geometry streams to the Turnip open-source Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware. Turnip remains the unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver for Qualcomm as Freedreno is to OpenGL. The geometry streams support relies as well on some recently reverse engineered registers with the Adreno GPU.

Connor noted in the pull request for Turnip geometry streams that the functionality is required for the Direct3D-on-Vulkan DXVK to expose the Direct3D 10_1 feature level.

After the merge request was open for the past month, it's now been merged into Mesa 20.3-devel ahead of this week's code branching. It will be interesting to see if the Qualcomm notebooks out there paired with Turnip and Hangover could actually lead to a lightweight, low-power Linux gaming setup in due course once the software stack is more mature.