Spec Ops: The Line Gets Boosted On Mesa With GL Threading

For fans of the 2012 video game Spec Ops: The Line that was brought to Linux in 2015, this Unreal Engine 3 powered title should run faster with the newest Mesa.

Spec Ops: The Line is the latest Linux video game getting a whitelist addition for Mesa OpenGL threading. This "Mesa_Glthread" functionality is a driver-agnostic Mesa OpenGL multi-threading implementation, especially of help to lower-end, multi-core CPUs.

With the mesa_glthread functionality not benefiting all games, the feature relies upon being whitelisted for specific executables or manually setting the mesa_glthread=true environment variable.

With the latest Mesa Git, Spec Ops: The Line is added as with a Core i7 4790K Haswell CPU paired with a Radeon R9 280X is about a 10% boost in frame-rates.