The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver's implementation of the graphics pipeline library (VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library) is becoming much faster thanks to fast-linking and various pending fixes. In turn this will get games making use of the extension the ability to ideally have no shader pre-caching while still enjoying no in-game stuttering. Valve's Linux graphics driver developers working on RADV have been working through some issues with the RADV graphics pipeline library and for Mesa 23.1 looks like it could be in good shape.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team and who is largely known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has been spending time recently getting the RADV graphics pipeline library support into good shape. He's been pursuing this effort with other Valve engineers focused on Linux, Hans-Kristian Arntzen and Samuel Pitoiset.

Blumenkrantz has out another entertaining blog post, this time about the RADV GPL adventures...

Mike published a lengthy blog post outlining the RADV graphics pipeline library adventure. Long story short, they achieved a 50,000% improvement in shader linking times and finally the prospects of the Vulkan graphics pipeline library are panning out... Besides this recent RADV work, only NVIDIA's proprietary driver has really been performant for fast-linking with its graphics pipeline library support.

For now the graphics pipeline library support with RADV is still hidden behind the RADV_PERFTEST=gpl environment variable but they hope that for next quarter's Mesa 23.1 release it may be in good enough shape for exposing by default.