In addition to Mesa 26.1 today seeing Vulkan present timing support finally merged to help reduce game stuttering and separately another long-in-development Mesa merge request for DG2 / Meteor Lake to improve performance as much as 260% in some scenarios, there is another merge today to Mesa Git for enhancing Intel graphics on Linux. For Intel Linux gamers the newest Mesa code adds a new DriConf workaround that is capable of halving the initial game load time for at least one problematic game title.
The new code in Mesa 26.1-devel introduces a “anv_disable_link_time_optimization” DriConf option. This DriConf option allows disabling link-time optimizations (LTO) by the ANV shader compiler.
The game causing a need for this new DriConf option is Monster Hunter Wilds a 2025 game developed by Capcom and built on the RE Engine. This action role-playing game turns out to have a big shader that with LTO can take quite a while on the initial game load, at least for the Intel ANV driver with the game running on Linux via Valve’s Steam Play (Proton).
This merge to Mesa adds that “anv_disable_link_time_optimization” DriConf infrastructure and applies it when the game Monster Hunters World is detected. The Git commit notes that with avoiding LTO it takes around half the time on initial game launch — until the shaders end up being cached — and the lack of LTO in this case wasn’t found to impact the in-game performance:
“MHW has a long-running shader compile step on first launch that is significantly sped up by disabling Link Time Optimization in the ANV driver.
Shader compile times with LTO disabled are 50% of baseline measurements and the benchmark shows no [statistically] significant change to performance (tested on LNL-M OOB)”
It will be interesting to see moving forward if this DriConf override ends up being found to help out any other game titles for reducing the initial game load time while not sacrificing the in-game performance without LTO.
