Linux gaming may not be as popular as Windows gaming, but it is a growing field. It is also improving both in terms of support and performance. Regarding the latter, Jason Ekstrand, a member of Intel's open source 3D driver team, has seen promising results with several games running on Linux after porting AMD compiler code to Intel graphics hardware.

The code is derived from ACO, short for AMD COmpiler, which is essentially a Valve-led shader compiler. It was first announced last July, and at the time Valve said it was intended to provide "the best possible code generation for game shaders and the fastest possible compilation speed. It was also intended to replace AMD's proprietary LLVM compiler.

As discovered by Phoronix, Ekstrand enabled an I/O vectorization path in the Intel driver for Linux, based on open source code originally written for ACO for use with AMD's Radeon Vulkan driver ...

Ekstrand has built an Intel GPU driver using code originally written for AMD graphics hardware that improves the performance of some OpenGL and Vulkan games on Linux by about 10%.

According to Ekstrand, so far, games such as Doom, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Aztec Runs, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, DiRT Showdown, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the game Batman using DXVK, a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D that allows users to run 3D applications on Linux using Wine.

"By far the most useful was the Tomb Raider game. We were also helped with some Batman games using DXVK," Eckstrand said.

Eckstrand outlined his findings in a merge request he made over the weekend, and if all goes well, his efforts will be implemented in a future Intel driver for Linux.