Valve Has Been Developing A New Mesa Vulkan Shader Compiler For Radeon

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 3 July 2019 at 02:00 PM EDT. 54 Comments
VALVE
Valve has been funding work on "ACO", a new shader compiler alternative to the de facto AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler currently used by both the RADV and RadeonSI Mesa graphics drivers for AMD Radeon hardware.

ACO is a new Mesa shader compiler designed to deliver "best-possible code generation for game shaders, and fastest-possible compilation speed." They have found very promising results so far for this alternative to AMD's LLVM shader compiler with much faster shader compile times and also helping the in-game FPS for several titles atop the RADV driver. This new compiler doesn't employ the LLVM infrastructure.

This ACO shader compiler is currently living within this Mesa tree. More details at SteamCommunity.com. I'll be firing up some benchmarks shortly.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week