Another Minor Performance Optimization For RADV

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 12 October 2017 at 06:21 AM EDT. 1 Comment
RADEON
While Timothy Arceri working for Valve was busy wiring up an on-disk shader cache for RADV, Samuel Pitoiset working for this gaming giant has been tackling some additional optimizations.

Samuel has been working on a number of RADV Vulkan driver optimizations/improvements recently with seemingly a shift in focus from all of his RadeonSI contributions earlier in the year.

Among other commits overnight by Samuel to RADV, catching my interest was the radv: use CLEAR_STATE for initializing some registers. He notes, "This improves some Vulkan demos by +1% to +3%."

It may not seem like much or as significant as other recent optimizations, but every little bit counts. It's been great to see the number of micro-optimizations landing recently for RADV.

I'll run some fresh RADV vs. RadeonSI tests in the days ahead assuming it's more stable than in my recent tests where there were some stability issues. RADV has traditionally lagged behind RadeonSI, but the gap may be closing with all the recent work. In yesterday's NVIDIA tests, with the current Vulkan Linux games we are now seeing the NVIDIA Vulkan performance universally better than OpenGL.

Mesa 17.3 should be an interesting update for open-source Radeon driver users to land in late November or early December given the many improvements recently to RADV, it now being officially a Khronos conformant driver, RadeonSI still stepping forward, and many other core improvements.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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