Reducing The CPU Usage In Mesa To Improve Performance

Timothy Arceri who previously crowd-funded work to add new GL extensions to Mesa and did so successfully multiple times has now written a new blog post on the topic of reducing the CPU usage in Mesa to potentially improve frame-rates.

Arceri's new post covers profiling the CPU utilization -- including using the Phoronix Test Suite and an OProfile module he was working on, along with other techniques. In the process of profiling OpenArena he ended up jumping into OpenAL's high CPU usage and landing some SSE optimizations there to halve its CPU use, which is now present in OpenAL 1.6. Last week meanwhile he submitted a patch to reduce the CPU usage in Mesa via an SSE optimization.

He's mainly been looking for areas of the Mesa code-base he can speed-up through simply writing SSE/AVX optimized code-paths when the Mesa drivers are run on modern CPUs with support for these instruction set extensions. Arceri notes, "my point is there is a lot of places someone could look at improving cpu use without much previous knowledge of the Mesa codebase."

Find out more via this blog post.