This Week

I escaped my RADV pen once again. I know, it’s been a while, but every so often my handler gets distracted and I sprint for the fence with all my might.

This time I decided to try out a shiny new Intel Arc A770 that was left by my food trough.

The Dota2 performance? Surprisingly good. I was getting 100+ FPS in all the places I expected to have good perf and 4-5 FPS in all the places I expected to have bad perf.

The GL performance? Also surprisingly good*. Some quick screenshots:

DOOM 2016 on Iris:

Playable.

And of course, this being a zink blog, I have to do this:

The perf on zink is so good that the game thinks it’s running on an NVIDIA GPU.

If anyone out there happens to be a prominent hardware benchmarking site, this would probably be an interesting comparison on the upcoming Mesa 23.1 release.

More News

I’ve seen a lot of people with AMD hardware getting hit by the Fedora 38 / LLVM 16 update crash. While this is unfortunate, and there’s nothing that I, a simple meme connoisseur, can do about it, I have some simple workarounds that will enable you to play all your favorite games without issue:

• For Vulkan-based games, delete/rename your Lavapipe ICD (rm /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/lvp_icd.*)
  • This will be workaroundeded in the upcoming Mesa releases and is probably already fixed in main
• For OpenGL-based games, set MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink %command% in your game’s launch options

I realize the latter suggestion seems meme-adjacent, but so long as you’re on Mesa 23.1-rc2 or a recent git build, I doubt you’ll notice the difference for most games.

You can’t run a full desktop on zink yet, but you can now play most games at native-ish performance. Or better!

Lastly

I’ve made mention of Big Triangle a number of times on the blog. Everyone’s had a good chuckle, and we’re all friends so we know it’s an inside joke.

But what if I told you I was serious each and every time I said it?

What if Big Triangle really does exist?

I know what you’re thinking: Mike, you’re not gonna get me again. You can’t trick me this time. I’ve seen this coming for—

CHECK OUT THESE AMDVLK RELEASE NOTES!

Incredible, they’re finally supporting that one extension I’ve been saying is crucial for having good performance. Isn’t that ama—

And they’ve even added an app profile for zink! I assume they’re going to be slowly rolling out all the features zink needs in a controlled manner since zink is a known good-citizen when it comes to behaving within the boundaries of—

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