The open-source PanVK driver providing Vulkan support for modern Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing big speed-ups in the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance in Vulkan tests as a result of new code merged today to Mesa 26.1.

Faith Ekstrand has been working on adapting the Arm Mali PanVK driver to using a new frame-buffer abstraction and ultimately helping out the multi-sample anti-aliasing performance around properly handling MSAA resolves.

The exciting takeaway from the now-merged code is:

"Finally, this MR also improves MSAA resolves by doing the resolve in a frame shader at the end of the render pass when we can. This massively improves the performance of the Sascha Willems multisampling example:

With 2x MSAA: 590 -> 2605 (4.4x speedup)

With 4x MSAA: 347 -> 2570 (7.4x speedup)

With 8x MSAA: 188 FPS -> 2494 FPS (13.2x speedup)

With 16x MSAA: 96.7 FPS -> 2483 FPS (25.7x speedup)"

At 2x MSAA there is "only" a 4.4x speed-up but at 16x MSAA is as much as a 25.7x speed-up with this new code.

Wow! See [1]this merge request for those using/interesting in the PanVK driver on Arm Mali hardware.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/39759