Merged today to Mesa 26.3-devel is a nice performance boost for Intel graphics with Valve's Steam Play when using DXVK for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over the Vulkan API. The open-source Intel ANV driver is seeing up to 5% better performance with DXVK.

The improvement now merged to Mesa is enabling buffer compression for the Intel ANV driver with DXVK. Previously the buffer compression option was enabled for VKD3D with Direct3D 12 on Vulkan as many DX12 games were seeing better performance while now it's opened up to DXVK too. On Intel Arc Battlemage there was 5.26% better performance with Shadow of Tomb Raider, 4.6% with Total War Warhammer 3, and 2% with Total War Pharaoh. On Intel Xe3 Panther Lake was 4.8% higher performance with Shadow of Tomb Raider, and Total War games in the 2% range, among the games tested.

The numbers can be found in this commit setting anv_enable_buffer_comp for DXVK.

As part of the merge was then decided to just drop the anv_enable_buffer_comp option that had been gated behind VKD3D, Source2 games, and now DXVK to now enable it everywhere for possible performance benefits in other games/layers out of this color control surface (CCS) buffer compression.

This change is merged for Mesa 26.3 that will debut as stable in November while for now is available from Mesa Git.