Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Focusing On Bettering The Arm Midgard Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Focusing On Bettering The Arm Midgard Support

While there hasn't been too much to write on it in recent weeks, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver within Mesa for Arm Midgard/Bifrost graphics continues chugging along. The latest work on it is switching over to a new scheduler for Midgard...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-Midgard-Scheduling

[archsway]

At the moment, this new scheduler is slower than the old one - for example, SuperTuxKart on the Cornfield Crossing track went from 86 fps to 83, and glmark2 went from a score of 572 to 569.

It's quite a small decrease, so hopefully the performance can be made back with the new optimization opportunities.

With glmark2, some benchmarks had quite big differences, with [jellyfish] increasing from 270 fps to 305 fps, and big increases to the [loop] tests (though that could be from unrelated commits).

[archsway]

I compiled mesa again following the batch of commits pushed an hour ago, and...

$ glmark2-es2
...
=======================================================
                                  glmark2 Score: 668
=======================================================

$ supertuxkart --kart=tux  --difficulty=3 --no-start-screen --profile-time=60 --track=cornfield_crossing
...
[verbose  ] profile: Number of frames: 7805 time 83.938004, Average FPS: 92.985298

So, that's a 15% improvement for glmark and a 7% improvement for SuperTuxKart.