RADV Vulkan Driver Introduces Support For ETC2 Compression

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RADV Vulkan Driver Introduces Support For ETC2 Compression

Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver now has support for ETC2 texture compression on select GPUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-Lands-ETC2-Compression

[boxie]

is this going to result in some performance improvements in some games?

[Sethox]

is this going to result in some performance improvements in some games?

Reading up on it by searching for it, in theory it should. since it's another compression visible for the driver. The only problem now is to make the code more flexible (like always).

[FireBurn]

Did you notice Marek's patches to add ASTC support to all Gallium drivers? It enabled OpenGLES 3.2 for radeonsi and possibly nvc0

[cl333r]

"The support is contingent on"
WTF

[drSeehas]

Why for GFX8 only Stoney? What about POLARIS?

[bridgman]

"The support is contingent on"
WTF

Spelling looks OK - was it mis-spelled earlier ?

Why for GFX8 only Stoney? What about POLARIS?

I believe the ETC2 standard ends up being mostly used in smaller embedded systems (where the competition is chips from the smartphone space), but it takes up a bunch of HW space so we tend to include it only in chips where we expect it to get used a lot... in other cases the driver just converts ETC2 textures to a format that the HW does support at loading time.

ETC2 and ASTC happened at more or less the same time IIRC, and my impression is that ASTC kinda won.

[drSeehas]

... mostly used by embedded systems rather than games etc, so we tend to only include support in HW that is likely to need it.

There are embedded POLARIS modules: E9550MXM and E9260.

[Imroy]

Is there a list somewhere of which texture compression formats are supported for each GPU?

[bridgman]

There are embedded POLARIS modules: E9550MXM and E9260.

Yep, but those are usually used with fairly capable CPUs so the overhead of translating ETC2 to another format is not a problem. It's the confluence of big GPU plus small CPU that usually leads to including native HW support.

Strictly speaking Stoney Ridge probably would have been fine without ETC2 because the CPU had relatively good single thread performance compared to our previous small APUs, but (a) the pattern was already established and (b) some of our customers planned to run Android on it which I think uses ETC2 as the primary format.