AMD RADV gets feature to help emulation and translation layers

Some fun news for AMD GPU owners with the open source RADV (Vulkan) Mesa driver, as it recently gained support for fragment shader interlock. This will be useful for emulation and translation layers.

The merge request for this work was opened back in April, with it being merged into Mesa a few days ago so it should hopefully be available in the Mesa 23.2 release due out in August. From the developer: "This merge request adds an implementation of VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock (Primitive Ordered Pixel Shading — POPS — in AMD hardware terms), a highly demanded feature in the emulation community (including for the Xbox 360 emulator I'm working on, Xenia), and one of the requirements of Direct3D feature level 12_1."

Where is it actually used? According to the dev various translation layers, emulators and games have support for it including: DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, the Zink driver, the Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx, the Xbox 360 emulator Xenia, the PlayStation 2 emulator Play!, a few games need it too like A Plague Tale: Requiem, GRID 2, Just Cause 3 and so on.

Overall it clearly seems rather useful to have and should make the gaming experience on AMD GPUs with RADV even better