Legendary Mesa Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák who was a longtime AMD employee and then joined Valve's Linux graphics driver team earlier this year has continued his focus now on perfecting his art around the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler.

Since joining Valve several months ago, Marek has managed to pull of some nice improvements in the RADV space after years focused on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Merged in the past day was a set of another 19 patches further optimizing RADV+ACO.

This latest round of patches is focused on helping improve pixel shader (PS) throughput under some conditions. Among those conditions are where if the depth and stencil fragment shader outputs have no effect, they can be removed; Marek noted that this can potentially double performance in this rare case. There is also other depth / stencil / sample mask elimination and other changes.

The big patch series also fixes alpha-to-coverage performance for GFX11/RDNA3 and newer. when the alpha-to-coverage enable state is static. Marek notes this should benefit both DXVK and VKD3D.

Plus some other changes are all part of this merge request now part of Mesa 26.3 for the stable debut in Q4.