AMD Gallium3D Shader Optimizations Yield Big Gains

Ultra quality settings for Xonotic also saw improvements with the shader optimization back-end for the Radeon HD 4000/5000/6000 series GPUs sans the Cayman HD 6950.

The Furmark OpenGL benchmark inside GpuTest saw nice performance improvements throughout with R600 SB.

While the R600 SB shader optimization back-end doesn't improve all OpenGL/GLSL workloads, for more demanding test cases the R600 SB code-path can lead to dramatic performance improvements. Where the R600 SB back-end doesn't help, the good news is that with the latest code we haven't encountered any performance regressions. Hopefully Vadim's patch will be merged soon for enabling R600 SB by default for boosting the Radeon R600 Gallium3D performance in the next Mesa release.