AMD's Catalyst Working On A GLSL Shader Cache

There's a lot of work going on right now to the AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver. We've written about new features coming to an upcoming Catalyst Linux driver but silently being pushed into the latest round of release is a GLSL shader disk cache.

Back in 2011 NVIDIA introduced a OpenGL Shader Disk Cache For Linux and now three years AMD is adding a similar feature to Catalyst on Linux. The shader disk cache is intended for compiled GL Shading Language (GLSL) shaders to be cached on disk so they don't need to be re-compiled later on. The shader disk cache serves to speed-up game loading times and reduce overhead by avoiding unnecessary shader compilation multiple times.

Mesa developers have also been working on a compiled shader cache similar in scope to the NVIDIA Linux binary driver and also what's now being done by Catalyst.

With the fglrx 14.30 release stream in newer -- including yesterday's Catalyst 14.9 for Linux and the OpenCL 2.0 driver -- is this GLSL shader compiler cache. AMD hasn't officially announced yet nor publicly document its functionality, but GLSL shaders are now being cached by default to ~/.AMD/GLCache.