Vulkan-Intel driver gets huge performance boost on Linux - up to 220% increase

Company Intel made a key improvement to its open Vulkan-ANV driver for Linux: to the development branch Mesa 25.2-devel added support memory pools — and this already gives impressive results. The new feature allows you to allocate large buffers for more efficient use of RAM and activate low-level optimizations in the kernel and GPU. The initiative was developed by an engineer Jose Roberto de Souza, and it took more than two months to implement it.

Test results from Phoronix speak for themselves: in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, performance is Lunar Lake graphics under Linux grew up on 221,9%. And this is not an isolated case - noticeable growth is also observed in games F1 22, Strange Brigade and even in Black Myth: Wukong, launched via Steam Play. Particularly sensitive to the improvement were the hybrid solutions of Intel with the new generation of graphics. Also, the family received acceleration meteor lakebut for now discrete GPU battlemage do not benefit from the innovation.

The update is available in the current Mesa 25.2 development and will be included in stable release next quarterHowever, it won't fit in Mesa 25.1, which is already close to the final release. This improvement strengthens Intel's position in the Linux gaming market, where open drivers are becoming more productive and competitive against solutions from AMD and NVIDIA.