Radeon GL Threading Work Leads To 70% Speed Boost In At Least One Game

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 30 October 2016 at 09:42 AM EDT. 40 Comments
MESA
Expert Mesa developer Marek Olšák at AMD is spending this weekend hacking on some new OpenGL threading code to benefit the open-source Radeon Linux driver stack.

One of the features sadly missing from Mesa 13 is OpenGL threading support that is on-par with what's been available by the proprietary drivers. Marek though has been working on some GL threading code to benefit Gallium3D / Radeon.

With the latest work. on his personal glthread-5-rebased Mesa Git branch, he appears to be making excellent progress. With that commit from Saturday he commented, "mush.. mush.. mush... mushrooms!! Borderlands 2 is 70% faster."

A 70% speed boost for Borderlands 2 with this Mesa GL threading! No word on the performance impact for other games that could benefit from OpenGL threading like Witcher 2. With Marek's experimental code, the mesa_glthread=true environment variable must be set for enabling the support.

Hopefully this GL threading work will be polished up and merged to mainline Mesa in the near future. Can't wait to run some new benchmarks!
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