Mesa Drivers Eyeing Per-Game Tuning Like Windows Graphics Drivers

MESA developers are exploring ways to bring more per-game tuning and optimizations to open-source Mesa drivers, potentially closing the gap with Windows graphics drivers that have long used this approach.

RADV Radeon Vulkan driver developers on Valve's Linux graphics team are evaluating the idea of greater use of per-game/app profiles within this open-source driver and for Mesa drivers at large. Currently for Mesa drivers with DriConf there is the ability to provide per-game/app workarounds while the consideration now is extending that to allow for more per-game optimizations.

Unlike the graphics drivers on Windows where there is a lot of per-game tuning and the like, for Mesa drivers there hasn't been much so to date. DriConf has largely been used for just working around various OpenGL and Vulkan bugs by different games/engines. Typically just matching against a binary name and applying whatever necessary per-driver overrides and the like.

But the hope among the RADV team is to allow for more performance optimizations and other tweaks on a per-game basis. DriConf would need to be extended to better manage different GPU architectures/generations as well as making it more robust for introducing new options.

There's also the idea raised by RADV developers of doing more for shader replacement/tuning by drivers, another step pursued by graphics driver vendors on Windows. Right now these are just ideas being tossed around by RADV/Mesa developers, but especially considering Valve's commitment to Linux gaming and their financial backing to the developers involved, it's quite likely this will turn into substantive action.

Those interested in the topic of per-game tuning/optimizations for Mesa drivers can see this Mesa GitLab ticket where the topic is now being discussed.