Intel's Alchemist engineering team has been working on improving its open-source Vulkan drivers for Linux—recent coverage from Phoronix shows that Team Blue's hard work is paying off, especially in the area of gaming performance. The site's founder, Michael Larabel, approves of the latest Mesa work produced by Intel engineers, and has commended them on their efforts to better the Arc Graphics family. His mid-month testings—on a Linux 6.4-based system running an Intel Arc A770 GPU—demonstrated a "~10% speed-up for the Intel Arc Graphics on Linux." He has benchmarked this system again over the past weekend, following the release of a new set of optimizations for Mesa 23.3-devel: "The latest performance boost for Intel graphics on Linux is by supporting the I915_FORMAT_MOD_4_TILED_DG2_RC_CCS modifier. Indeed it's panning out nicely for furthering the Intel Arc Graphics Vulkan performance."

He apologized for the limited selection of games, due to: "the Intel Linux graphics driver still not having sparse support in place, but at least that will hopefully be here in the coming months when the Intel Xe kernel driver is upstreamed. Another recent promising development for the Intel open-source graphics driver support is fake sparse support to at least help some games and that code will hopefully be merged soon." First up was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive—thanks to the optimized Vulkan drivers it: "enjoyed another nice boost to the performance as a result of this latest code. For CS Linux gamers, it's great seeing the 21% boost just over the past month."He observed that: "the performance difference with Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam Play with the Intel Arc Graphics A770 was minimally impacted by this recent Intel ANV driver work."Larabel concluded: "The biggest gain from the Intel ANV Mesa code in the past week was found with the VKMark Vulkan benchmark cases...Huge improvements over the prior Mesa state albeit is a rather synthetic test case. In any event it's great seeing this latest round of optimizing benefit Intel's open-source Vulkan driver following the more broad performance work in the prior round. Paired with the forthcoming fake sparse support, hopefully seeing the Intel Xe kernel driver merged at least experimentally hopefully later this year, and other ongoing Intel Mesa optimizing, it's an exciting summer to be using Intel Arc Graphics hardware with this open-source driver stack."