Optimizing Shaders On Mesa For Intel NIR With Shader-DB

Alejandro Piñeiro and others at Igalia have been working on adding a NIR to Vec4 pass to the Intel i965 driver back-end along with making other optimizations around NIR, the new intermediate representation for Mesa to replace GLSL IR.

For those interested in the process of making optimizations and testing them to ensure no regressions on the number of generated shader assembly instructions, Piñeiro wrote a blog post today about this process using the shader-db test-cases commonly used by Mesa developers for comparing shader outputs.

Those wanting to learn about optimizing shader assembly instructions with Mesa/Shader-DB can go read Alejandro's blog post.