RadeonSI On-Disk Shader Cache Lands In Mesa Git

Taking things further than the recent landing of the TGSI on-disk shader cache for this Gallium3D IR, Timothy Arceri at Valve has landed his support for a RadeonSI driver on-disk shader cache.

Rather than just caching the TGSI IR to the disk that in turn still needs to be compiled to the hardware instructions for the given GPU, this RadeonSI on-disk shader cache is storing the actual hardware-specific compiled shaders for caching. This should yield a more significant benefit over the TGSI caching.

With making use of the previously-merged Mesa shader cache code, wiring up this RadeonSI shader cache took less than one hundred lines of code and is active as of this commit.

Great to see this finally land in Git and will be a new feature for Mesa 17.1. This should help shader heavy games like Shadow of Mordor, particularly for titles that don't compile shaders strictly during load-time.