The New R300 Register Allocator Is Still Being Developed

Tom Stellard, the student developer who participated in last year's Google Summer of Code to improve the R300 GLSL compiler for the open-source ATI/AMD driver, is still around and contributing to upstream Mesa. Last month he announced his new R300 register allocator being ready for wider testing. He's now announced further improvements on this GPU register allocator for Mesa.

Our benchmarks of the new R300 register allocator last month showed some promising results in terms of performance improvements where shaders with lots of scalar values are used, as the register count is down significantly.

What Tom's been doing over the past month is supporting for-loops and fixing various outstanding bugs. It also hooks into the recently merged floating-point texture additions.

He mentions this work in this blog post. The improved R300 register allocator for now isn't yet merged into mainline Mesa but is living in his personal Git repository for those interested in testing it with R300 through R500 (Radeon X1000 series) graphics processors.