Writing on their personal blog, Jason Ekstrand from the Intel Mesa team has written up some information on what they've been doing to improve the Intel drivers on Linux. What they're talking about isn't exactly new, since the fixes are already in Mesa but it's nice to get some information about how they came across the issues and what they did to solve them.

Regardless of your feelings towards Wine, DXVK, Steam Play and so on, no one can ignore the benefits they bring to the people actually working on the drivers. Giving them so many more ways to test and push Linux graphics drivers is a good thing, as it means we can end up with much better drivers for all sorts of workloads (not just gaming!).

Ekstrand noted two specific games in the blog post, with Skyrim Special Edition originally performing like a slide-show. After some debugging with the help of RenderDoc, Ekstrand was able to find a certain draw call that was causing issues which resulted in this patch bringing the game up to a playable framerate.

They go on to talk a little about Batman: Arkham City as well which was causing GPU hangs with DXVK, after some investigation they patched the driver some more to optimize it and improve performance. The ending remarks are also nice to read:

So what's the moral of the story? It's not that bad shaders or spilling is the root of all performance problems. (I could just as easily tell you stories of badly placed HiZ resolves.) It's that sometimes big performance problems are caused by small things (that doesn't mean they're easy to find!). Also, that we (the developers on the Intel Mesa team) care about Linux gamers and are hard at work trying to make our open-source Vulkan and OpenGL drivers the best they can be.

Really good to see driver developers get stuck in to work on improving performance. You can see the whole post here, interesting stuff!