Mesa's Gallium HUD Gets A Simple Option

The Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) has matured into quite a useful option for Mesa users over the past several years. There is now a Gallium HUD "simple" option.

The Gallium HUD allows displaying a number of GPU/CPU/system vitals rendered above OpenGL programs for those using the Gallium3D drivers like RadeonSI, Nouveau NVC0, or even LLVMpipe. The HUD is activated via the GALLIUM_HUD= environment variable and the help value will provide an output of the various supported options.

While the Gallium3D HUD offers a lot of useful information, with each sensor also displaying a line graph of the results, it can cause the display to get quite cluttered even with just a few options enabled:

But as of yesterday in Git for Mesa 18.1-devel is a new "simple" mode. If simple is the first argument passed to the GALLIUM_HUD environment variable, a much simpler and text-only HUD will be displayed. Here's how that looks:

This much simpler interface should be less distracting if you are just wanting to see the frame-rate, CPU utilization, or temperatures while gaming and do not care about the historical data on the line graph. Kudos to AMD's Marek Olšák for adding this new simple option.