Mesa 26.0 was due to be branched last week and in turn start its feature freeze but ended up being pushed back to tomorrow (21 January) to allow some lingering features to land. It’s been beneficial for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" with several interesting merge requests having landed in time for Mesa 26.0.

First up, the merge request made it for using function calls to separate out any-hit/intersection shader compilation. This is the merge that delivers up to 10x faster ray-tracing pipeline compilation and a particularly big win for Unreal Engine 4 titles. That merge request by Valve developer Natalie Vock made it into Mesa 26.0 as another big step forward for Radeon ray-tracing on this open-source driver.

Another merge hitting Mesa Git today for the 26.0 release is optimize layered fast clear colors when comp-to-single is supported. That merge by Valve’s Samuel Pitoiset can provide a 2~5% performance improvement at least for the DiRT Rally 2.0 racing game.

Another merge with unspecified performance benefits (it "probably helps") is always fast-clear color image with comp-to-single on RDNA3 and RDNA3.5 graphics. Again, from Samuel Pitoiset.

Some nice last minute RADV improvements for Mesa 26.0. We’ll see if any other interesting changes for RADV or the other OpenGL/Vulkan drivers make it into Git prior to the expected Mesa 26.0 code branching on Wednesday. Mesa 26.0 is shaping up to be a very great quarterly feature release and I’ll be running some fresh Mesa 26.0 performance benchmarks soon on Phoronix.