Mesa gets a big CS:GO speedup, plus upcoming AMD RADV performance boost

Mesa, the open source driver set for Linux, has two rather interesting bits of work done recently that gamers might want to keep an eye on.

Firstly, for those of you who are big fans of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a patch from developer Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer was merged recently that was noted to reduce the startup time from "150s to 10s". CS:GO has historically taken forever to load up on Linux, although Valve did release a patch recently that helped a little. So for AMD / Intel gamers on Linux, that should be a nice boost for the next Mesa release.

Unrelated but still interesting is that developer Mike Blumenkrantz has been back to blogging about their work to improve various parts of Mesa. The result is a patch that's not yet merged, that brings with it a "40% improved indexed draw throughput" and "50% improved non-indexed draw throughput" (in short: better performance for the AMD Vulkan driver). No specific workload or games were mentioned to directly benefit but as with all improvements, every little helps.

Always nice to see performance improvements for Linux drivers.