More Driver CPU Overhead Work Being Tackled By Valve Developers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: More Driver CPU Overhead Work Being Tackled By Valve Developers

Valve's Linux developers continue working on lowering the CPU overhead of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Gallium-Uniform-Packing

[microcode]

More importantly, I'm looking forward to seeing 99.9th percentile and max frame times get cropped down closer to cruising speed. 240fps ET: Legacy is less important than having all frames take less than 16.6̅, 8.3̅, or 6.94̅ milliseconds almost 100% of the time..

[GruenSein]

It is great to see this much progress coming to AMD's GL-driver even from third party companies. I find this effort quite notable as AMD for good reason seems to favor reusing code across platforms as seen in their pursuit of open sourcing their PRO Vulkan driver instead of contributing to RADV. With current Mesa being confined to Linux this is quite the extra mile to go. I wonder, if they will consolidate their PRO GL and open GL drivers in the future. As a lot of effort has gone into both the PRO driver and RadeonSI, this will probably only be feasable when a new GPU architecture breaks compatibility with RadeonSI, though.

[microcode]

It is great to see this much progress coming to AMD's GL-driver even from third party companies. I find this effort quite notable as AMD for good reason seems to favor reusing code across platforms as seen in their pursuit of open sourcing their PRO Vulkan driver instead of contributing to RADV. With current Mesa being confined to Linux this is quite the extra mile to go. I wonder, if they will consolidate their PRO GL and open GL drivers in the future. As a lot of effort has gone into both the PRO driver and RadeonSI, this will probably only be feasable when a new GPU architecture breaks compatibility with RadeonSI, though.

For what it's worth, there's basically no legal or technical reason they couldn't ship Mesa on Windows (it'd be a bit of work getting it integrated with the platform, adapting the kernel driver, and getting the WGL implementation up to scratch though).
As far as I'm aware, everything is licensed permissively (MIT, Khronos, or Boost).

[Azpegath]

I think that this is very welcome, reducing the CPU overhead feels like one of the areas where improvements can definitely be achieved!

[boxie]

More importantly, I'm looking forward to seeing 99.9th percentile and max frame times get cropped down closer to cruising speed. 240fps ET: Legacy is less important than having all frames take less than 16.6̅, 8.3̅, or 6.94̅ milliseconds almost 100% of the time..

I would like to see the target framerate feature hit mesa. no need to display more frames than can be displayed!

but yes - getting the frame rate even and smooth with no micro stuttering is a must!

[humbug]

The last one year Valve is investing like crazy into AMD's linux ecosystem. I wonder if they have some special plans to launch AMD ryzen+Vega based steam machines.
Or it's just the fact that since this stuff is open source they can help out...

More importantly, I'm looking forward to seeing 99.9th percentile and max frame times get cropped down closer to cruising speed. 240fps ET: Legacy is less important than having all frames take less than 16.6̅, 8.3̅, or 6.94̅ milliseconds almost 100% of the time..

Yep.
Just one slow frame out of every thousand is enough to harm your user experience.

[humbug]

with current Mesa being confined to Linux this is quite the extra mile to go. I wonder, if they will consolidate their PRO GL and open GL drivers in the future. As a lot of effort has gone into both the PRO driver and RadeonSI, this will probably only be feasable when a new GPU architecture breaks compatibility with RadeonSI, though.

I assume that now Mesa openGL is already faster than Windows Crimson drivers OpenGL.
It would be a shame if those performance improvements cannot be shared with windows users, not doing so only hurts the openGL and hence Linux landscape overall...
I guess it's a question of how much AMD values openGL performance on windows, or do they not worry because most people use directX.

[ShFil]

Still wondering why amd doesn't sell license for small GCN to arm manufactures.

[mibo]

I think Valve is not so much interested in fps but rather in low latency to get a good VR experience from AMD/MESA.