An exciting addition landing into the Mesa 25.3 codebase today is support for AMD’s Vulkan anti-lag extension, VK_AMD_anti_lag.
VK_AMD_anti_lag was added in Vulkan 1.3.281 last year as part of the AMD effort to reduce latency while gaming. The Vulkan extension paces the CPU to make sure it does not get too far ahead of the GPU in order to keep low latency between receiving input and serving screen updates.
Daniel Schürmann as one of Valve’s Linux graphics driver contributors worked on adding the VK_AMD_anti_lag support to Mesa. VK_AMD_anti_lag is implemented as an implicit Vulkan layer that can be shared among the Mesa Vulkan drivers. Schürmann explained in the merge:
vulkan: implement VK_AMD_anti_lag as implicit vulkan layer
VkLayer_MESA_anti_lag is a lightweight implicit layer which provides an open-source implementation of the VK_AMD_anti_lag vulkan extension.
The algorithm used by this layer is very simplistic and only aims to minimize the delay between calls to vkQueueSubmit or vkQueueSubmit2 and the begin of the execution of the submission.
In order to build VkLayer_MESA_anti_lag, pass -Dlayers=anti-lag to meson. It is possible to either install the layer or to use
VK_ADD_IMPLICIT_LAYER_PATH=
/share/vulkan/implicit_layer.d/ for testing purposes.
(Keep in mind that you have to adjust the library_path in the json file in that case.)
After three months under review/discussion, great seeing this VK_AMD_anti_lag implicit layer merged to Mesa 25.3 for enjoying by RADV and open-source Mesa Vulkan drivers for Linux gamers wanting to leverage anti-lag. Some Linux distributions like CachyOS have already opted for carrying these VK_AMD_anti_lag patches while waiting for the code to be mainlined.
