The performance boost looks crazy good, but it's unknown whether other graphical workloads can see such improvements.
New Mesa Driver Changes Reportedly Fix Long-Standing Graphics Corruption Issues to Deliver Massive Performance Uplifts on Intel Alchemist
The new Linux patches brought some incredible changes for Intel's DG2 graphics apart from the original goal of introducing correctness and stability. The Intel open-source graphics driver engineer, Francisco Jerez, submitted a set of 18 patches that have been merged into Mesa 26.1 to address graphics corruption issues on Intel's DG2 graphics, such as Alchemist discrete GPUs and the Meteor Lake iGPUs.
While originally intended to fix the graphical corruption issues, the new patches are reportedly delivering up to 260% of performance boost in real-world gaming scenarios. As per the report, the NBA 2023, when running in DirectX 11 mode at 4K resolution on ultra settings, saw a whopping 260% performance boost. The new patches reportedly introduce partial resolves for the HiZ-CCS surfaces. So, instead of resolving the entire depth buffer, Mesa now resolves only the regions required by the workload.
After switching to partial resolves this series appears to improve performance of workloads that do frequent sampling from non-WT depth surfaces (e.g. MSAA surfaces). Trace Nba2K23-trace-dx11-2160p-ultra improves performance by a whopping 260% on Gfx12.5 parts
Basically, this helps the driver keep HiZ and CCS active while sampling depth data safely, which eliminates the corruption issues and cuts the memory traffic simultaneously. As per the note, this is most visible in graphical workloads where there is frequent sampling from MSAA surfaces. As per the report, only one game instance was analyzed, and unfortunately, we don't know how much of a difference these patches will make in other games or graphical workloads.
Nonetheless, the older Intel hardware is likely to do better in similar scenarios, but since it's only for Linux, Windows users won't see the same changes. Phoronix states that this patch series has been under development since September 2024. So, it has been a really long time, which clearly reflects the complexity of the corruption issues, but thankfully, not only do the patches address the core issues, they also boost gaming performance.
News Source: Phoronix
About the author: Sarfraz Khan is a hardware reporter with a focus on PC components and the builder community. With years of experience writing about PC hardware and laptops, his work has been featured on several reputable technology publications. Sarfraz's hands-on experience is demonstrated through his first-person accounts of using and comparing different hardware configurations, providing practical and relatable insights for everyday users. His technical analysis is respected by peers in the enthusiast community and has been cited by specialized hardware sites such as Germany's Igor's Lab.
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