Intel's Mesa GLSL Shader Cache Is Speeding Up Game Load Times

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's Mesa GLSL Shader Cache Is Speeding Up Game Load Times

At the start of the month the Intel i965 Mesa driver finally landed its on-disk shader cache, months after the GLSL on-disk shader cache originally landed in core Mesa and wired up for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. While you can't play too many shader-heavy games with current Intel integrated graphics, this GLSL shader cache within Mesa 17.4-dev Git is working well for speeding up load times and does provide some frame-rate benefits in games dynamically loading shaders.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=25544

[tchiwam]

Is the cache saved on a tmpfs or mass storage ? Maybe worth playing around with those...

[Michael]

Is the cache saved on a tmpfs or mass storage ? Maybe worth playing around with those...

Wherever you have your ~/.cache/ pointed to.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

but of cours this game really isn't playable with the current class of Intel graphics.

[M@yeulC]

Is the Steam precompiled shader distribution scheme somehow interfering with these benchmarks? Could it? And if not, how is it possible to prevent it?

[Michael]

Is the Steam precompiled shader distribution scheme somehow interfering with these benchmarks? Could it? And if not, how is it possible to prevent it?

no because their caches point to stable versions of Mesa and not daily Mesa Git builds.... if the hashes don't match, they won't be used. and so far I believe only RadeonSI caches are being generated and then the Vulkan caches.

[M@yeulC]

no because their caches point to stable versions of Mesa and not daily Mesa Git builds.... if the hashes don't match, they won't be used.

Thanks a lot for the explanation!

It makes sense, I guess: I was under the impression that it was indexing and caching every binary shader ever encountered, but this sounds more sane.

and so far I believe only RadeonSI caches are being generated and then the Vulkan caches.

Do you mean that this functionality is only being used with RADV?

[Michael]

Thanks a lot for the explanation!

It makes sense, I guess: I was under the impression that it was indexing and caching every binary shader ever encountered, but this sounds more sane.


Do you mean that this functionality is only being used with RADV?

RADV as well as RadeonSI, at least that's how it sounded like it was communicated before.