Gallium3D Now Supports NIR Shader Disk Cache

With the Gallium3D OpenGL on-disk shader cache most notably used right now by the RadeonSI driver, TGSI is the intermediate representation currently being cached to the disk for speeding up game load times, etc. Given the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature, Timothy Arceri of Valve has added NIR caching support.

With the latest Mesa Git, there is now NIR shader disk cache support, including for NIR compute shaders. The infrastructure is largely the same but modifications had to be made for handling NIR rather than TGSI into the Mesa state tracker. After that infrastructure work he went through and turned it on for RadeonSI.

This and other NIR improvements are in place for Mesa 18.1. When trying out the RadeonSI NIR back-end last month, it still left a lot to be desired but is being quickly improved upon by Valve and AMD developers.