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 [1]Delta Color Compression (DCC) fast clears for 8bpp and 16bpp bits per pixel on GFX11/RDNA3 graphics processors. Last year the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver [2]enabled a similar optimization .

The RADV optimization was just removing a conditional check to bail out if the bits per pixel was 16 or less. Samuel Pitoiset remarked in [3]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."

[4]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.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Delta+Color+Compression

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/RadeonSI-Whole-Improvements

[3] https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=3c81961c2e2fa3e8bacf85114871d881024fc002

[4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/33756