Gallium3D Patches To Help GRID Autosport, Metro Redux & More

For those having some extra time today to help test out some new Mesa patches or just curious about what's on the horizon, Nicolai Hähnle of AMD has posted some Mesa state tracker patches for benefiting several modern Linux games.

A set of 14 patches that were just volleyed onto the mailing list implement accelerated glReadPixels PBO downloads within the Mesa state tracker, benefiting Gallium3D drivers. These patches should help several modern games.

GRID: Autosport should be helped when running on Gallium3D drivers by this patch series.

Nicolai Hähnle explained in the patch series, "this series makes the existing PBO texture upload code symmetric, adding a download path that uses shader images a no-attachment framebuffers. This should help performance by reducing stalls in several games, including GRID: Autosport (verified with an apitrace), Metro 2033 Redux, and likely others."

Metro Redux is another visually-demanding, interesting Linux game that should be helped by these latest Mesa patches for implementing accelerated Pixel Buffer Object downloads for glReadPixels.

Unfortunately, no stock benchmark data was provided. Once the code is merged though, I'll likely test it. With the patches just appearing now on Mesa-dev, it's not entirely clear if the work will land in time for the Mesa release due next month that's going into feature freeze in just a few days.