It may sound unbelievable to some, but not everyone has a datacenter beast with 128GB of VRAM shoved in their desktop PCs. Around the world people tell the tale of a particularly fierce group of Linux gamers: Those who dare attempt to play games with only 8 gigabytes of VRAM, or even less. Truly, it takes exceedingly strong resilience and determination to face the stutters and slowdowns bound to occur when the system starts running low on free VRAM. Carnage erupts inside the kernel driver as every application fights for as much GPU memory as it can hold on to. Any game caught up in this battle for resources will surely not leave unscathed.

That is, until now. Because I fixed it.

Mesa 26.0 is big for RADV’s ray tracing. In fact, it’s so big it single-handedly revived this blog.

Yes, you heard that right.

Ray Tracing Pipelines.

On RADV.

Enabled by default.

Now merged in Mesa main.

GPU hangs are one of the most common results of pretty much anything going wrong GPU-side, and finding out why they occur isn’t always easy. In this blog post, I’ll document my journey towards finding the cause of one specific hang in the game “Splitgate”.