Mesa Continues With More Optimizations For Workstation OpenGL Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Continues With More Optimizations For Workstation OpenGL Performance

Well known AMD open-source driver developer Marek Olšák continues squeezing Mesa for every bit of possible performance, which in recent months has been with a seemingly workstation focus...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21.1-More-SPECviewperf

[zboszor]

FYI, another biggie is coming also from Marek: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/..._requests/8798
As the MR description says, there is a 75% jump in the "drawoverhead" (a piglit microbenchmark) performance in the "mesa_no_error=false" case and a 10% jump in the "mesa_no_error=true" case, bringing both cases practically to the same performance level with only 0.1% difference in these two cases after the patchset.

[skeevy420]

LOL. Workstation OpenGL graphics performance.
Is this a throwback article from the 90s?

Or Yada Yada Vulkan Yada Yada Rust Something Something Darkside

[jrch2k8]

FYI, another biggie is coming also from Marek: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/..._requests/8798
As the MR description says, there is a 75% jump in the "drawoverhead" (a piglit microbenchmark) performance in the "mesa_no_error=false" case and a 10% jump in the "mesa_no_error=true" case, bringing both cases practically to the same performance level with only 0.1% difference in these two cases after the patchset.

Would this mean someone at AMD's top brass had a stroke and was replaced with someone with more the 3 working neurons that realized it was idiotic to have 3 drivers codebases instead of optimizing the living bejesus out of one?

[Adarion]

Would this mean someone at AMD's top brass had a stroke and was replaced with someone with more the 3 working neurons that realized it was idiotic to have 3 drivers codebases instead of optimizing the living bejesus out of one?

I think this is more a "naturally grown" situation. In the beginning there was mostly the blob, then radeonhd emerged, then the freedom stack grew. Later they made a cut with GCN (?) and set up a new driver stack, probably with less historic burden for the newer HW.
But blob still was most suitable for certain scenarios and probably contained some 3rd party blobs for which they did not yet have substitutes. Moreover, the ("2nd gen") free stack is also old by now but needed this time to mature and now they're filling the remaining gaps and doing optimizations for the cases where the blob had to fill in.

Thus it wasn't the optimum to have a multi driver scenario, but circumstances just lead to it. I think on the long term it will settle for the freedom stack. (Still, they have that blob one anyway on W32, but I guess due to it mostly MIT licensed or something, they can share code.

[MadeUpName]

AMD has a LOT more jingle to throw around these days and Lisa Sue seems to be hell bent on fixing the back log of problems AMD has had rather that just doing stock buy backs like so many companies these days. The big problem that money hasn't been able to solve so far is fab capacity.

[pal666]

Would this mean someone at AMD's top brass had a stroke and was replaced with someone with more the 3 working neurons that realized it was idiotic to have 3 drivers codebases instead of optimizing the living bejesus out of one?

they have enough neurons to understand that they can't get rid of windows codebase if they have 99% of customers from windows

[bridgman]

It's more like 2 GL drivers than 3 - one open-source code base in Mesa and a separate closed-source driver that runs on Windows and on Linux as part of AMDGPU-PRO.

[wizard69]

AMD has a LOT more jingle to throw around these days and Lisa Sue seems to be hell bent on fixing the back log of problems AMD has had rather that just doing stock buy backs like so many companies these days. The big problem that money hasn't been able to solve so far is fab capacity.

This exactly! People really seem to be dense about how bad off AMD was only a couple (well maybe 3 now) of years ago. That was the end of years of barely getting by, so yeah lots of catching up to do. At this point I'm left with the impression that AMD actually prefers open source and is only hamstrung by legal issues.

Personally I hope that they continue to support their software and especially work on getting older hardware to work well and not just focus on the new hardware. Many companies would simply let that old hardware die off instead of fixing anything. I don't think we are far off at all from having simply the best OpenGL / hardware combo possible on Linux. That is a good thing! In general I've been really impressed with AMD's desktop hardware over the last year. I can't really say that for the first series of Ryzen laptop chips from a couple of years ago which took forever to get proper support under Linux. It takes time to recover a comapny like AMD and frankly they seem to be doing a very good job of it.

[shmerl]

It's more like 2 GL drivers than 3 - one open-source code base in Mesa and a separate closed-source driver that runs on Windows and on Linux as part of AMDGPU-PRO.

Is there any movement by AMD in the direction of making radeonsi work on Windows and then throwing out the closed OpenGL one? It will also make Windows gamers more happy about OpenGL situation there.