Unleashing the power of 3D graphics on the Raspberry Pi is an ongoing effort at Igalia. We are constantly exploring new opportunities to maximize the GPU's potential. The process of identifying applications that can be optimized is highly rewarding. Every so often, we uncover a breakthrough, enabling us to boost application performance up to ~70%.

The graphics stack for the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 is built on the Mesa user-space drivers (V3D/V3DV) and the Linux kernel driver V3D. These drivers are fully mature, with the upstream Mesa Vulkan driver V3DV having already achieved Vulkan 1.3 conformance, and the OpenGL/ES driver V3D exposing desktop OpenGL 3.1.

However, just having working, conformant drivers isn't enough for us. In this talk, we will demonstrate how we go the extra mile to extract the maximum performance from the Raspberry Pi's GPU, proving that a more performant embedded GPU is possible.

In addition to explaining where we currently stand, we will showcase several cases where optimizations in the Mesa user-space drivers led to significant performance improvements. We will also review recent developments in the kernel driver, including support for Huge Pages in the GPU kernel driver and our experience using Transparent Huge Pages (THP) on an embedded device.

By the end of this talk, we hope the audience will have a better understanding of the graphics stack for embedded GPUs and how to start getting more juice out of an embedded board.