Compute Shader Patches For Nouveau Pascal

Patches posted today for Nouveau NVC0, the open-source NVIDIA driver for modern GeForce GPUs, implement OpenGL compute shader support for Pascal hardware.

The four patches by independent contributor Boyan Ding implement support for ARB_compute_shader with Pascal hardware. Boyan commented, "Pascal uses a new compute launch descriptor format that is not compatible with previous generations. This series adds support for the new format, thus enabling ARB_compute_shader for Pascal. The piglit tests for compute shader all passed on my GP107." This is just under 200 lines of new code for the NVC0 Gallium3D driver.

The patches for now are on Mesa-dev. NVC0 has already exposed ARB_compute_shader for previous generations of NVIDIA hardware.

While it's nice seeing the OpenGL compute shader support come together for Pascal, don't get your hopes too high considering this latest-generation NVIDIA hardware doesn't yet have any re-clocking support so the performance will be poor and the accelerated 3D is only coming together with Linux 4.12 when paired with the newest firmware image binaries.