Last week we saw the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver add SQ Thread Trace support for this hardware block found on AMD GPUs. The SQTT block is used for performance profiling and now the RADV support has been extended to handle GFX10/Navi.

With the SQ Thread Trace support that came out last week, it was limited to supporting GFX9/Vega. But Valve's Samuel Pitoiset who has been leading this RADV profiling effort got the GFX10/Navi support squared away and merged this Monday morning.

The SQ Thread Trace block exposes per-draw/per-dispatch metrics to help in profiling and this SQTT support ties in nicely with the Radeon GPU Profiler for beginning to make it conducive for conducting performance profiling with this open-source AMD Vulkan driver.

Following the SQTT Navi support, Pitoiset also updated the driver entry points inspired by Intel's ANV driver. This big rework is part of the effort for handling internal driver layers for SQTT profiling.

This RADV profiling work is coming together nicely for Mesa 20.1 and by its release in May will hopefully have more functionality in tow.