The Mesa RADV Vulkan driver has merged initial support for VK_EXT_descriptor_heap in Mesa 26.1, a new Vulkan extension introduced in January 2026 and developed collaboratively by Valve, NVIDIA, AMD, and Google. This extension enables explicit management of descriptor memory, addressing limitations of the older VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer and offering more predictable performance. The feature is not yet enabled by default due to limited test coverage, but can be activated via the RADV_EXPERIMENTAL=heap environment variable. DXVK already merged descriptor heap usage in February, and VKD3D-Proton has a draft PR in progress, making this a meaningful improvement for Steam Play (Windows game compatibility on Linux). NVIDIA's R595 Linux driver already supports the extension.
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