100+ More KHR_no_error Patches, Might Help Some Games

Open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset for Valve has published a set of 101 new patches for implementing more KHR_no_error support.

KHR_no_error is the OpenGL extension for allowing some OpenGL error checking/handling to be disabled. This is fine for bug-free OpenGL games/applications but if an error were to occur, it could potentially result in undefined behavior. There's been a lot of KHR_no_error work the past few months from Valve developers as when enabling this support it's possible for some CPU/power savings thanks to the less overhead by eliminating the error checking.

With the newest 101 patches, Samuel commented, "It seems like this series improves Dirt Rally in low by ~3%, this is not much but I think it's worth trying. I didn't do any other benchmarks but it should help here and there. The errors path shouldn't be slower."

KHR_no_error for Mesa can continue to be enabled via the MESA_NO_ERROR=1 environment variable while there has also been work towards allowing a whitelist via drirc for turning on this support depending upon the game/application, similar to the recent Mesa glthread whitelist.