Intel Gets Back To Working On Their OpenGL Shader Cache

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 19 August 2017 at 08:00 AM EDT. 2 Comments
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Prior to joining Valve to work on the Linux graphics stack where one of his first objectives was working on the Gallium3D/RadeonSI shader cache, Timothy Arceri had been working for Collabora where he was tidying up the Mesa on-disk shader cache with a focus on the Intel i965 OpenGL driver. That has yet to be merged with Intel support but now there are developers back to working on this support.

The Mesa on-disk shader cache with RadeonSI support has been working out splendid the past few months in Mesa and is a big help for many shader-heavy games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Shadow of Mordor to avoid unnecessarily having to frequently recompile shaders. Intel's Jordan Justen is now working on the i965 disk shader cache so hopefully that will land for Mesa 17.3.

This morning Jordan sent out a set of 27 patches at just over one thousand lines of code for implementing the shader cache for the Intel OpenGL driver, including a number of Timothy Arceri's earlier patches specific to the Intel driver. At this stage, the Intel OpenGL shader cache isn't being enabled by default but needs INTEL_SHADER_CACHE=1 as an environment variable to be activated. He isn't seeing any regressions currently except for a possible Deus Ex + Skylake oddity.

More details via this patch series and hopefully we'll finally see the functionality in Mesa Git in the near future.
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