The RADV Vulkan driver performance on the latest Mesa Git code is already looking quite good compared to the NVIDIA Vulkan Linux performance and even the Vulkan driver on Radeon Software under Windows. But the game is not over for the never-ending process of tuning the driver for optimal performance.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux GPU driver team has today added another optimization to RADV for Mesa 18.1-devel Git. For GFX8 GPUs, he's enabled TC-compatible HTILE for 16-bit depth surfaces. This reduces the number of depth compression passes amd avoids some copies. GFX8 GPUs are from Polaris through Fiji, Stoney / Carrizo APUs, Iceland, and Tonga.

On a Polaris 10 GPU, Pitoiset found the Serious Sam 2017 performance to go up by about 4%. Talos and F1 2017 should also benefit but at least for his system's configuration he didn't notice any difference. In a shadow-mapping Vulkan demo the performance went up by 10~15%, which is now enough for RADV to compete with the AMDVLK driver in this particular demo.

Details from this patch now in Mesa Git.