Zink Lands Async Pipeline Precompiles For Better Performance, Less Game Stuttering

Mesa's Zink driver implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan continues advancing at a rapid pace and today the latest major addition landed: async pipeline precompiles.

Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve has landed the async pipeline precompiles support to allow for precompiling shaders during the game loading process has landed. This should help in speeding up game load times as well as leading to less stuttering.

This is dependent upon the underlying Vulkan drivers exposing the necessary support, but if all goes well this is another step in the right direction for Zink's gaming potential.

If all goes well, and if the vulkan driver's fast-linking is truly fast, the full pipeline should be dynamically combined in time to avoid stuttering, and an optimized variant will be queued for async compile to be used the next time the pipeline triggers a draw

More details on this notable Zink addition via this merge request and Mike's blog. The code merged this afternoon for Mesa 22.3 going stable around December.