Intel's open-source team has its ANV Vulkan driver merged into Mesa 22.3, offering improvements to the mesh shading performance with the company's Arc A-series GPUs.

Mesh shading in the Intel Arc Vulkan GPU driver is improved in the newest Mesa 22.3 merge

Two months have passed since the introduction of the Vulkan mesh shader extension in Vulkan 1.3.226, offering enhanced support for the Vulkan Linux driver for Intel's Arc series graphics hardware. The API extension will allow for mesh-shading compatibility across multiple vendors. Michael Larabel of the website Phoronix mentions that the timing of the newest merge is very stable and allows for some additional performance tweaks for the Arc GPU series.

For the Intel Arc A770 GPU, adjustments were made to the distribution of the task and mesh batch size values to optimize the performance with the company's preferences and specifications surrounding their newer GPUs. The maximum thread group value was also altered to improve the Vulkan driver support, and an additional patch was to correct the value.

The window for Mesa 22.3 merges is closing soon, allowing the full release to appear in the next month. Larabel notes that compared to Mesa 22.2, the newest 22.3 build is crucial for users with Intel Arc dGPUs compared to the previous support found in the previous version.

AMD and NVIDIA will need to finalize any support, adjustments, and last-minute fixes before the freeze. However, the improved support will assist Intel inside Linux operating systems.

Users can check out the entire Mesa 3D graphics library on Gitlab, which utilizes C, C++, Python, and other languages, and learn more about the Mesa Project. This documentation is open-source and available for the public to view the changes submitted and merged. The Mesa 3D graphics library presently has 162K commits, 59 branches, 757 tags, and up to 5 TB of project storage before the merge freeze.

News Sources: Phoronix, Mesa 3D on Gitlab, Mesa 3D on Gitlab