Additional Mesa Shader Cache Optimizations En Route

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 5 April 2017 at 06:34 AM EDT. 2 Comments
MESA
Timothy Arceri has posted a series of a patches to further improve the Mesa shader cache's hot and cold load times.

The set of three patches is able to significantly help with both the cold (no cache on the system) and hot (reloading of a cached shader from disk) load times for many games while some games are less affected than others. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided remains a big benefactor of these latest patches with dropping its cold time from 285 to 261 seconds and hot load time from 34 to 27 seconds, according to testing.

The changes include not running the GLSL pre-processor when skipping shader compilation and delaying optimizations on individual shaders when a cache is available.

The patch series with improvements are noted here. Hopefully this will get into Mesa Git soon for Mesa 17.1. Mesa Git still has the shader cache enabled by default for relevant drivers/hardware and so these improvements will be much welcome and hopefully re-enforce the decision to keep it enabled by default for v17.1.
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