Intel’s Vulkan Linux Driver Lands More Performance Optimizations Ahead Of The B570

It’s not only the Intel GPU compute stack seeing some nice improvements recently but over with the Mesa 25.0-devel code for the Intel “ANV” open-source Vulkan driver there have been some new performance optimizations arriving this week.

Ahead of the Arc Graphics B570 Battlemage graphics cards shipping later this week, the newest Intel Vulkan driver code for Linux systems has been seeing some general performance tuning and optimizations.

Merged on Monday to Mesa Git was slow clear if fast-clear cost is not mitigated. The patch explains:

“Fast-clears require expensive flushes beforehand and afterwards. The cost of flushes are decreased in a series of back-to-back fast-clears as no extra fast-clear flushes are required in between them. If the ratio of a command buffer’s recorded back-to-back fast clears over independent fast-clears falls below 1/2, prevent that command buffer from recording any further fast-clears.

Averaging two runs of our Factorio trace on an A750 shows a +14.37% improvement in FPS.”

Not bad seeing a 14% boost for at least one game with the existing Alchemist graphics.

Also of interest to some may be the enabling of more storage compression on Intel GFX12 and newer graphics IP. That month-old merge request made it into Mesa Git on Monday.

Being merged overnight was a more subtle optimization for enabling more fast-clears with image format lists. That change is having slight performance benefits across multiple games. It also fixes a number of bugs reported against the Intel ANV driver.

Another merge landing in Mesa 25.0-devel today for both the ANV Vulkan driver and Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver is reducing fast-clear synchronization for some minor performance benefits.

Great seeing these Intel Vulkan open-source Linux driver improvements continue to flow in as the company continues ramping up their Battlemage offerings.