Intel Vulkan Driver Lands One-Line Change That Can Bring Minor Performance Benefits
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 Git is a one-line change to the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver that is showing to deliver some slight performance benefits or up to 3% noted in some select games.
The Intel ANV driver is now enabling compute BTI prefetch by default. The merge request simply notes that this is a performance regression as opposed to what the Intel hardware documentation recommends.
Simply enabling the "DRI_CONFIG_INTEL_FORCE_COMPUTE_SURFACE_PREFETCH" feature to match the hardware documentation recommendations can show some slight performance benefits. On a geo mean basis was just around a half percent improvement to frame-rates with some game traces seeing 1% higher frame-rates while at best was around 3~4% better performance when testing traces of the God of War and Destiny 2 games. Every little bit of extra performance helps especially with the Intel ANV driver still having a gap to close against the Intel Windows driver performance.
See this merge request for those curious about this one-line change.
The Intel ANV driver is now enabling compute BTI prefetch by default. The merge request simply notes that this is a performance regression as opposed to what the Intel hardware documentation recommends.
Simply enabling the "DRI_CONFIG_INTEL_FORCE_COMPUTE_SURFACE_PREFETCH" feature to match the hardware documentation recommendations can show some slight performance benefits. On a geo mean basis was just around a half percent improvement to frame-rates with some game traces seeing 1% higher frame-rates while at best was around 3~4% better performance when testing traces of the God of War and Destiny 2 games. Every little bit of extra performance helps especially with the Intel ANV driver still having a gap to close against the Intel Windows driver performance.
See this merge request for those curious about this one-line change.