Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Adds Memory Pool Support For Some Massive Performance Gains
Merged a few minutes ago to the Mesa 25.2-devel graphics driver code for the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver is proper memory pool support. In turn this can deliver some magnificent performance improvements on the likes of Lunar Lake and other newer Intel graphics processors.
After undergoing review and testing the past two months, this memory pool support was merged today for Mesa 25.2. Intel driver engineer José Roberto de Souza explains in the merge request adding the ANV memory pool support:
The Intel Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics should benefit a lot but also the likes of Meteor Lake are shown to provide measurable performance benefit too. However, Intel engineers didn't find this memory pool support benefiting the Battlemage discrete graphics.
Here are some of the Intel driver performance benchmarks with these 19 patches added:
Outright massive! As much as 221.9% the performance with Shadow of the Tomb Raider using the Vulkan version on Linux. Or 120% to 163% with a variety of other games and Vulkan demos. Steam Play games like F1 22 and Strange Brigade and Black Myth: Wukong all seeing double digit percentage improvements on Lunar Lake graphics under Linux.
This merge looks very exciting and I will be working on some fresh Intel Lunar Lake Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks shortly. Too bad though it won't be out in stable form until Mesa 25.2 next quarter as opposed to making the cut-off for the soon-to-be-stable Mesa 25.1 version.
After undergoing review and testing the past two months, this memory pool support was merged today for Mesa 25.2. Intel driver engineer José Roberto de Souza explains in the merge request adding the ANV memory pool support:
"A new approach to implement memory pool in ANV, following the same approach as Iris and using pb_slab.
Allocating larger buffers allows KMD/HW to enable optimizations that makes access to memory faster, also because of minimum HW alignment required in some cases we allocate 4k or 64k long buffers for usages that only needs a few bytes, wasting a lot of memory. Memory pool takes care of both of those things."
The Intel Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics should benefit a lot but also the likes of Meteor Lake are shown to provide measurable performance benefit too. However, Intel engineers didn't find this memory pool support benefiting the Battlemage discrete graphics.
Here are some of the Intel driver performance benchmarks with these 19 patches added:
👁 Intel memory pool benchmarks
Outright massive! As much as 221.9% the performance with Shadow of the Tomb Raider using the Vulkan version on Linux. Or 120% to 163% with a variety of other games and Vulkan demos. Steam Play games like F1 22 and Strange Brigade and Black Myth: Wukong all seeing double digit percentage improvements on Lunar Lake graphics under Linux.
This merge looks very exciting and I will be working on some fresh Intel Lunar Lake Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks shortly. Too bad though it won't be out in stable form until Mesa 25.2 next quarter as opposed to making the cut-off for the soon-to-be-stable Mesa 25.1 version.