Valve Engineer's AMD Linux RADV Vulkan driver fix boosted an FSR2 demo sample app by 228% on RDNA 2 GPUs

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(Image credit: AMD)

Two years ago, a bug report pointed out that the open-source Linux graphics library Mesa's RADV (Radeon Video) driver for AMD RDNA and GCN architecture GPUs had "significantly less" performance than the AMDGPU-PRO driver within the AMD FSR2 sample app. This issue has finally been fixed [h/t Phoronix].

Valve Linux driver team engineer Samuel Pitoiset fixed an issue these architectures had with culling triangles and lines when all W positions were zero. Since culling relates to the clearing of assets from the cache in order to improve performance, it makes sense that key culling optimizations can net huge gains. For this AMD FSR 2 sample application tested under Linux with AMD RDNA 2 architecture specifically, the "massive performance difference" between drivers has been fixed in the application, giving a 228% improvement.

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.