New Intel Improvements In Mesa Git, Including For Old Hardware

There's more improvements in Mesa Git to talk about this week for Intel open-source customers, including those still on older "Gen4" graphics hardware.

Kenneth Graunke has committed SIMD16 texturing support for old Intel "Gen4" graphics processors. This commit allows the SIMD16 mode to work for more programs and texturing is much more efficient than SIMD8. Ken mentions in the commit that for an old Intel GM45 system this increases the performance of "Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut" by about 20%.

For newer Intel hardware, Matt Turner of Intel meanwhile has blogged about Combining constants in i965 fragment shaders. Thanks to work on emitting MAD instructions by the Intel i965 Mesa driver, there's a measurable reduction in the number of instructions emitted -- with and without NIR usage -- and at least for a WebGL micro-benchmark leads to a measurable improvement in performance.

These latest Intel i965 Mesa driver improvements are found in Mesa Git master for the Mesa 10.6 release due out within the next few months.

Matt's blog post also mentions that Intel is still hiring more developers too for working on their open-source graphics driver stack.