In time for the Mesa 26.2 stable release expected out in August, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap descriptor heap support by default.

Back in Mesa 26.1, [1]RADV introduced descriptor heap support but until now has required setting the RADV_EXPERIMENTAL=heap environment variable for enabling the support. But with no more known issues remaining, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics team has enabled descriptor heap support by default with the latest Git code.

[2]This commit now in Mesa 26.2-devel turned on descriptor heap support by default. It follows [3]a similar move by Intel last week . Descriptor heaps are also now being used by default with [4]the new DXVK 3.0 release .

The Vulkan API's descriptor heap extension allows for explicit management of descriptors and memory used to store descriptors (descriptor heaps). VK_EXT_descriptor_heap addresses issues uncovered with VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer and should provide more portable guarantees and more predictable performance characteristics.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Merges-Descriptor-Heap

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/commit/26cc643a500b843243ac9552497098dc958c7815

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-ANV-Descriptor-Heaps-On

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-3.0-Release