ARB_bindless_texture Patches Posted For RadeonSI Gallium3D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ARB_bindless_texture Patches Posted For RadeonSI Gallium3D

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve has posted a set of 65 patches needed for wiring in ARB_bindless_texture support inside RadeonSI Gallium3D...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ARB_bindless_texture-RSI

[VikingGe]

Some games optionally using bindless textures are [...] Hitman [...]

Maybe that'll yield more playable framerates on my system. Though I'm rather surprised to see that they actually use bindless, considering that it's a massive PITA to support both bindless and the old binding model.

[andrei_me]

Isn't it one of the major extensions to improve perf on RadeonSI? After bindless, whatelse could/need to be implemented to improve perf?

[HokTar]

Does anybody know why mesametrix.net has not been updated for a month now?

[Mystro256]

Does anybody know why mesametrix.net has not been updated for a month now?

Well there hasn't been any OGL feature changes for this month, but with that said, two commits seem to be missing from April 21st. I believe Creak is the maintainer for mesa matrix.

[ua=42]

Well there hasn't been any OGL feature changes for this month, but with that said, two commits seem to be missing from April 21st. I believe Creak is the maintainer for mesa matrix.

If you look at the bottom, you can see when it last parsed the changelog. It hasn't run the parser for a month.

[gnarlin]

I wish they'd add Vulkan to mesa matrix.

[Creak]

Well seen HokTar, something must be broken, I'll watch that tomorrow (it's a bit late here)

ua=42 The date at the bottom is for the last time feature.txt has been parsed, if the script didn't detect any change in git's file history, then it doesn't trigger a parsing (but I should change this info... I was thinking it was useless at the time, but now I can see that it can be misleading)

As for Vulkan gnarlin, I would also like to have that... I started a thread on the mailing list, the devs aren't against it, but I didn't have any answer on where to get the information (for OpenGL, there's is feature.txt)

Mystro256 Thanks for the mention

[Creak]

Ok, it was easier than anticipated... I forgot to restart cron after my last update (poin poin poin....)

[efikkan]

Isn't it one of the major extensions to improve perf on RadeonSI? After bindless, whatelse could/need to be implemented to improve perf?

A quick article on bindless textures.
Normally during rendering, textures has to be bound to a few texture units. Rendering of multiple objects usually means repeated binds to these texture units, causing a lot of work for the driver. With bindless textures you make a lot of textures resident upfront(thousands of textures), and then render a number of objects using any of them. The shader code then accesses the textures using pointers mapping directly to GPU memory, saving the driver from having to constantly update the states. The main benefit is the ability to use many more textures freely, but it also means you can more efficiently batch rendering of objects, saving a huge amount of API calls and work for your renderer and the driver.

I don't know of any games which uses bindless textures, which is probably the result of lack of driver support. It does require redesign of the render code and tweaks to shader code, so it's not one of those features which benefits old software.