Valve's Radeon "ACO" Vulkan Compiler Back-End Now Supports Navi

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 10 October 2019 at 06:48 AM EDT. 1 Comment
VALVE
The promising ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver now has support for GFX10/Navi graphics!

ACO was recently merged into Mesa 19.3 for this Valve-funded, gaming-focused Vulkan shader compiler back-end for RADV. But up until now it has only supported GFX8 and GFX9 hardware while now initial Navi/GFX10 support has been merged. ACO ultimately aims to deliver better performance over the existing back-end while also more quickly compiling shaders to help with game load times.


Hitting the Mesa 19.3-devel Git tree this morning was the basic Navi support. However, there still are known bugs within the ACO GFX10 code, "Note that not everything works perfectly yet, so I haven't actually enabled ACO by default on Navi yet."

There still are several weeks left until the Mesa 19.3 feature freeze deadline so hopefully before then the ACO back-end will be in good shape. Enabling this alternative to AMDGPU LLVM can be done via the "RADV_PERFTEST=aco" environment variable.
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