Merged last week to Mesa 24.2-devel was an important merge request for the Broadcom V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the modern Raspberry Pi single board computers.

The [1]merge from Igalia engineer Alejandro Piñeiro moves the V3DV driver to using Mesa's common framework for dynamic tracking and implements the [2]VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state extension.

The Vulkan extended dynamic state extension has been around for several years to provide more flexibility around Vulkan pipelines. Making use of VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state can allow for games/apps to reduce the number of pipeline state objects compiled and bound.

VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state was originally worked on by engineers from Valve, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Google, and others. With Valve's participation, yes, it's important for gaming. The VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state extension can be used by the likes of [3]DXVK and VKD3D-Proton.

So whole the graphics capabilities of the Raspberry Pi board is rather limited, it's another important Vulkan extension now at least supported for helping Vulkan software/games run on this low-cost Arm platform.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/27609

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/DXVK-1.7.1-Released