NIR Compile Times Are Being Lowered Thanks To Latest Mesa Patches

The latest driver optimization work by Timothy Arceri on Valve's Linux GPU driver team has been working on function inlining within NIR rather than within the GLSL IR optimizations. The net result is faster NIR compile times that benefit the Intel OpenGL driver and also help with RadeonSI Gallium3D.

Arceri has been working to improve the compile times for NIR since right now with RadeonSI the compile times are slower than using the TGSI code-path. This latest patch series is a step in the right direction and it also happens to help the i965 NIR performance too.

The patches for now can be found on Mesa-dev. With these patches on Intel when measuring the time to compile the shader-db tests, the accumulated time drops from 1613 seconds to 1487 seconds, or an improvement of about 8%.