RadeonSI NIR Back-End Picks Up Support For More OpenGL Extensions

It was just a few days ago that Valve Linux developer Timothy Arceri enabled GLSL 4.50 support for RadeonSI's NIR back-end after previously taking care of tessellation shaders and other requirements. Now he has taken to implementing some other extensions in RadeonSI's NIR code-path.

Arceri has now enabled ARB_shader_group_vote support. That extension was added to RadeonSI last March and is for comparing values across shader invocations as a means of handling branching in OpenGL. ARB_shader_group_vote was made a requirement with OpenGL 4.6.

The other RadeonSI NIR support is for ARB_shader_ballot. ARB_shader_ballot isn't required for OpenGL 4.6 but is part of the OpenGL AZDO "Approaching Zero Driver Overhead" extensions.

Great to see the RadeonSI NIR support continuing to mature and step closer to parity with their stock code-paths. Trying out the RadeonSI NIR support can be done using the R600_DEBUG=nir environment variable.