Just ahead of the AMD RDNA4 GPUs launching, the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver has expanded a performance optimization technique for existing RDNA3 graphics processors.
Samuel Pitoiset of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team has enabled the use of Delta Color Compression (DCC) fast clears for 8bpp and 16bpp blocks per pixel on GFX11/RDNA3 graphics processors. Last year the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver enabled a similar optimization.
The RADV optimization was just removing a conditional check to bail out if the blocks per pixel was 16 or less. Samuel Pitoiset remarked in the patch:
“This was disabled during GFX11 bringup few years ago to follow RadeonSI, but this is working just fine and RadeonSI also enabled it recently.”
This merge hitting Mesa 25.1 Git today enables the DCC fast clears for 8bpp/16bpp with RDNA3 GPUs as a minor performance optimization. It’s too bad this oversight wasn’t addressed long ago for benefiting the AMD RDNA3 GPUs but at least it’s taken care of now in Mesa Git.
