RADV Lands Another Navi Optimization In Mesa 21.1 To Help With MSAA Performance

The developers working on the RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Mesa are relentless in their quest for delivering optimal performance. Hitting Mesa 21.1 today were another set of patches for enhancing the MSAA anti-aliasing performance for GFX10 (Navi 1x / Navi 2x) graphics cards.

With this MR to allow skipping FMASK decompressions, Vulkan games making use of multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) should see around 1~2% faster performance with the current Navi and newer GPUs.

This RADV change was worked on by frequent RADV contributor Samuel Pitoiset on behalf of Valve.

This work and many other significant RADV goodies will be found in the Mesa 21.1 release that should debut as stable in late May or early June while for now using the likes of the Oibaf PPA or other third-party builds or just building from Mesa Git yourself you can enjoy this bleeding-edge open-source Radeon Vulkan experience. One of the remaining features we are still waiting on though is the Vulkan ray-tracing for RADV but otherwise in very good shape even with the very latest RDNA2 graphics cards.