Unigine Heaven 3.0 Now Works For Radeon Gallium3D

After a series of Mesa commits today by Marek Olšák, the R600 Radeon Gallium3D driver is now handling Unigine Heaven 3.0, the visually impressive OpenGL tech demo. There's also been other important Mesa Git commits that happened today.

R600 Gallium3D had worked for earlier Unigine Heaven releases, but the version 3.0 release from last year had failed with R600g. (Since that point, Unigine Heaven 4.0 was released along side Unigine Valley 1.0 earlier this year.)

Unigine Heaven 3.0 should now work on R600 Gallium3D with Git master, but the performance is likely to still be disappointing. Among the changes that were made include a new driconf option to disable ARM_shader_bit_encoding to work around an issue with the Unigine Engine code and other changes, including an override for forcing the GLSL version, etc.

Marek Olšák worked on these changes and also fixed up today was the S3TC force option and interestingly a new "dump_on_error" flag for the "MESA_GLSL" environment variable for dumping shaders only when Mesa hits compilation errors.

Another important change by Marek makes the driconf application/game-specific workarounds now be applied to all files. Up to now the drirc application-specific special settings were only being applied by default to the Intel i965 driver over a simple parameter. That parameter has now been removed so the workarounds are applied for all drivers -- including Radeon and Nouveau Gallium3D. This is now good news for the Unigine tech demos, among other games/applications, now not needing special environment variables to be set when running the software.

Phoronix readers might also notice something else that's different about the Mesa Git commit today, which will be covered in a separate Phoronix article.