Valve + LunarG Open Up Their Mesa Testing Results

As covered back during XDC2017, Valve and LunarG have been working on more extensive testing of Mesa to catch regressions and meticulously spot any performance changes as they occur. That framework is now publicly available to see the results and for developers allows tracking their own Mesa development branches.

Via share.lunarg.com is where the public test results can be found for tracking any performance changes across multiple branches on a variety of hardware.

There are hundreds of games being tested with Steam on Linux. But before anyone asks, unfortunately, it's just traces being played back that were recorded of the OpenGL/Vulkan calls for the games. With all of the games not being benchmark-friendly, they are relying upon the graphics traces as the test-cases for tracking Mesa performance. In some cases this might not be particularly representative of actual game performance due to not running all of the game logic, etc.

Additionally, the execution/reproduction of these test cases is not public. The traces/shaders of games have long been a gray area for redistribution so these tests are only run internally by LunarG on the behalf of Valve and not publicly available for download. If graphics driver developers need access to the traces so they can debug/profile a change, Valve is providing them directly to the developers on a case-by-case basis after granting them a gratis copy of the particular game.

Hopefully this tracking by Valve and LunarG will lead to fewer regressions in Mesa for Linux game titles moving forward.