VOOZH about

URL: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-PanVK-25.7x-16x-MSAA

⇱ Mesa PanVK Driver Seeing Up To 25.7x Speedup For MSAA - Phoronix


👁 Phoronix

Mesa PanVK Driver Seeing Up To 25.7x Speedup For MSAA

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 23 February 2026 at 08:15 PM EST. 31 Comments
The open-source PanVK driver providing Vulkan support for modern Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing big speed-ups in the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance in Vulkan tests as a result of new code merged today to Mesa 26.1.

Faith Ekstrand has been working on adapting the Arm Mali PanVK driver to using a new frame-buffer abstraction and ultimately helping out the multi-sample anti-aliasing performance around properly handling MSAA resolves.

The exciting takeaway from the now-merged code is:
"Finally, this MR also improves MSAA resolves by doing the resolve in a frame shader at the end of the render pass when we can. This massively improves the performance of the Sascha Willems multisampling example:

With 2x MSAA: 590 -> 2605 (4.4x speedup)
With 4x MSAA: 347 -> 2570 (7.4x speedup)
With 8x MSAA: 188 FPS -> 2494 FPS (13.2x speedup)
With 16x MSAA: 96.7 FPS -> 2483 FPS (25.7x speedup)"

At 2x MSAA there is "only" a 4.4x speed-up but at 16x MSAA is as much as a 25.7x speed-up with this new code.

👁 PanVK MSAA


Wow! See this merge request for those using/interesting in the PanVK driver on Arm Mali hardware.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.