Nouveau Gallium3D Finally Seeing Mesa Shader Disk Cache For Faster Game Load Times

Written by Michael Larabel in Nouveau on 17 February 2020 at 06:44 PM EST. 12 Comments
NOUVEAU
While the open-source Intel and Radeon OpenGL drivers within Mesa have long employed an on-disk shader cache to help with game load times by being able to load previously compiled shaders from disk, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver is on the heels of finally seeing similar support.

Nouveau saw a TGSI shader cache a few years ago while now it's finally seeing support for caching the compiled shaders.

This support was worked on by Mark Menzynski of Red Hat's graphics team. With the 8 patches, he finds this Nouveau shader disk caching to indeed help with "significantly improving loading times" for shader-heavy games.

Hopefully we'll see this improvement land for Mesa 20.1 although the open-source NVIDIA Linux gaming experience is still sub-optimal until the re-clocking situation is sorted out for post-Kepler GPUs.
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