Freedreno Gallium3D Gets A Performance Boost

Freedreno, the leading open-source ARM graphics driver, has picked up an important performance-boosting feature inside of its Gallium3D driver inside mainline Mesa.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver now has a hardware binning pass support for the Qualcomm Adreno A3xx graphics processors. This pass filters out non-visible vertices for tiles, thus speeding up performance. Rob Clark, the principal Freedreno developer, says that for OpenGL workloads with lots of vertex loading there can be a 35~45% boost in performane.

This performance enhancement for the reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno/Snapdragon graphics driver isn't enabled by default in the new open-source code, but requires setting the "FD_MESA_DEBUG=binning" environment variable.

Rob has also begun implementing support for the Gallium3D HUD within the Freedreno code-base.

These latest Freedreno Gallium3D driver updates were shared via Rob's blog.