Xclipse Driver

The idea

Samsung's Galaxy S24 FE has an Xclipse 940 GPU, built on AMD's RDNA3. PC games in Android emulators such as GameNative depend on Samsung's closed Vulkan driver, which offers less than DXVK expects. This project runs Mesa's open-source RADV driver on the phone instead and tunes it for this one chip.

What I worked on

Fixed hardware bugs specific to the 940: stale data from its GL1 cache (blue streak artifacts), texture formats it can only point-sample, GPU page faults in merged shader stages and scratch memory, and a wave64 register clobber. Turned off NGG culling on the 940 (+28% average FPS in Unigine Heaven), brought BC7 texture memory down to Samsung's level, and halved BC5 conversion error.

Built the testing around it: 22 on-device correctness and speed tests run against both drivers, scripts that drive GameNative and play games to a fixed scene, and a benchmark that alternates drivers, cools the phone between runs and reports 1% lows, memory, heat and screenshot similarity.

Results

In the same GTA V scene, against Samsung's driver, over three runs each: 69% higher 1% low FPS (15.0 against 8.9), 34% faster from launch to gameplay, 55% GPU load against 76%, 11% less GPU memory and visibly sharper textures. Average frame rate is the same on both, about 31 FPS. Life is Strange: True Colors runs at 21 to 26 FPS; on Samsung's driver it stops when creating its compressed textures.

Try it

The driver is a zip that GameNative imports in its Driver Manager. Download it from the [latest release](https://github.com/aaditya-v-more/xclipse-driver/releases/latest); the install steps and container settings are in the release notes. It is for the Galaxy S24 FE only.

Context & attribution

Extends JimVulkan's radv-xclipse, a port of Mesa's RADV driver to Samsung's GPUs, starting from yoro1836's Xclipse 940 bring-up. Mesa's RADV is the work of AMD, Valve and the Mesa community. MIT licensed.