In another nice win for open source graphics, the Vulkan Driver for Intel on Linux is looking set to get a nice speed boost. Coming from developer Mike Blumenkrantz, who only just recently did another speedup in the Mesa drivers.
Blumenkrantz blogged about it, in their usual funny way, going over some profiling they did on the Intel ANV driver using the vkoverhead tool. Thanks to their investigation the result is two small patches that aren't yet merged into Mesa but once in, should provide a "60%+ improvement in draw throughput on ICL". The fun thing is that the patches only touch a few lines and yet provide such a boost.
What's the real world performance difference? Well, Blumenkrantz said at the end of their blog post:
I’m just micro-optimizing for the benchmarks that I write, not saying this will double your Cyberpunk 2077 FPS.
I’m not saying it.
Every little helps though right?
Really it just goes to show that having open source drivers is the way to go, as anyone can come along and find various ways to optimize them both big and small.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
wit_as_a_riddle Sep 19, 2022
MasterSleort Sep 19, 2022
This is only potentially useful for people relying on their intel CPU chip's integrated graphics, correct? No benefit for anyone using AMD or NVIDIA.
Or the discrete Arc graphics that might/might not ever get released. They would probably use the same driver.
This is only potentially useful for people relying on their intel CPU chip's integrated graphics, correct? No benefit for anyone using AMD or NVIDIA.Correct, although RADV has seen similar patches recently which AMD users will benefit from.
At least on the RADV side of things I wouldn't expect huge improvements for real-world applications though. It's good that improvements are being made, but a 35% improvement in pure vkCmdDraw throughput is unlikely to lead to more than a 1-2% bump in something like DXVK, since there's a lot more going on than just Vulkan draw calls.
Not sure what's going on with Cyberpunk on Intel though, even on the D3D12 side of things, bottlenecks tend to be elsewhere.
Last edited by YoRHa-2B on 19 September 2022 at 8:55 pm UTC
silverhikari Sep 21, 2022
so what are the Cyberpunk FPS on decent CPU with Nvidia's GPU?
with my 980ti i get about 30 - 50 fps on medium settings. though if you have a card that is pascal or lower expect lower performance as cyberpunk 2077, uses dx12 and vkd3d has problems because of hardware limitations
I expect this is due to Cyberpunk 2077 being an exceptionally draw-heavy game so it's affected more than others. Games are very diverse in this regard, each relying more or less or not at all on certain GPU features.
The original post by Mike Blumenkrantz in his blog "Super Good Code" is very accessible and hilarious (as usual), so totally worth reading!
He explains that the performance gain is due to fixing a performance regression he inadvertedly introduced during previous work on the intel driver. It was undetected until he started using a vulkan performance profiling tool to analyse the drivers and find optimization opportunities...
His fingers are probably fine now, but i fear for his ego... he was feeling like a king after finding the recent RADV optimization
Last edited by Marlock on 21 September 2022 at 9:51 am UTC
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