After two years being on the TODO list for a possible performance optimization, the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has now merged an HiZ plane optimization that can yield up to a few percent frame-rate improvement for Linux gaming/graphics on newer Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware.

Since August 2024 there has been a Mesa work item to investigate a HiZ plane optimization on Intel GFX12 hardware and newer. They have been setting a bit known to be advantageous to performance but disabled it as a workaround for some rendering corruption.

Finally with this merge request opened two weeks ago and now in place for Mesa 26.2, the Hierarchical-Z "HiZ" plane optimization is enabled for read-only depth tests. This improves performance by avoiding HiZ planes for draw calls which compute depth and perform read-only depth tests.

For the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 they are seeing around 3% better performance on the likes of Alchemist and Battlemage graphics. Also 1~2% for Hogwarts Legacy from Alchemist to Panther Lake integrated graphics. Plus they can enable HiZ for at least one more game (Sons of the Forest) without introducing any performance regression. See all the details in the Mesa merge request above.

This HiZ plane optimization is now in Mesa Git ahead of Mesa 26.2's stable release in August.