Valve Adds RADV "Secure Compile" Support For Pre-Caching Game Shaders

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Adds RADV "Secure Compile" Support For Pre-Caching Game Shaders

The latest feature contribution by Valve's Linux driver developers to the open-source RADV driver is a "secure compile" feature...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-Secure-Compile

[cl333r]

With Nvidia GT 1030 Left4Dead2 from Steam on Linux is unplayable because of in game stuttering. It's part of OpenGL's problematic nature but can easily be avoided in Vulkan because OpenGL's compilation is fake and the driver compiles or recompiles the shaders whenever it wants, whereas Vulkan has strict rules - one of the main reasons why I'm learning Vulkan.

[aufkrawall]

What is a "fake compilation" supposed to mean?
Proper OGL renderers don't have shader compile stutter, e.g. the Linux versions of the Metro games, Feral's Hitman port or Doom in Wine. The Source Engine simply has a terrible OGL renderer, it runs like garbage vs. Gallium Nine.

[cl333r]

What is a "fake compilation" supposed to mean?

It means that the GL API exposes the compilation process like glCreateShader, glLinkShader, glCompileShader but some drivers don't compile the shader right away as you tell them but schedule the compilation for the future and immediately return, plus while playing a game if the driver thinks the state of the pipeline changed to be worth a recompilation of the shaders it will do so under the hood triggering stutter.
Here's a guy talking about it:

https://youtu.be/yHZ3-AMJA6Y?t=1163

[skeevy420]

Just look at Valve, the other day they got a bug fixed for a competitor and today they're getting more optimizations added to that driver. When will all this madness end

So, anyone have any idea on how we're supposed to get the number of threads to use?...like how we used nproc+1 for make back in the day, not the env variable (I'm not THAT dumb ).