RADV+ACO Lands FP16 Features - One Step Closer To Making ACO The Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RADV+ACO Lands FP16 Features - One Step Closer To Making ACO The Default

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver's ACO shader compiler back-end has merged its FP16 related bits and in turn putting the ACO back-end very close to being enabled by default for this open-source AMD Vulkan driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RADV-ACO-FP16-Merged

[CochainComplex]

cant wait to see ACO completed and in full action

[TemplarGR]

Awesome news! Now we need ACO on RadeonSI and potentially on CLover as well. In OpenGL games sometimes it is painfully obvious we need faster compiling, i can't wait for ACO!

[SkyWarrior]

I hope these changes will make aco fully compatible with all dx11 games. Assassins Creed Black Flag does not run with god rays enabled using dxvk and aco. LLVM however is flawless and god rays work as intended.

[Azpegath]

So what's the deal with the LLVM-implementation then? Wasn't the purpose of using LLVM that it could leverage a lot from that project, and that it would be more general and benefit other drivers as well?
Is there some write up to what went wrong and why it was a bad choice? Or at least a summary of pros and cons, and why they've now shifted?

[skandalfo]

Is there some write up to what went wrong and why it was a bad choice? Or at least a summary of pros and cons, and why they've now shifted?

This announcement explains it all.

[xxmitsu]

I hope these changes will make aco fully compatible with all dx11 games. Assassins Creed Black Flag does not run with god rays enabled using dxvk and aco. LLVM however is flawless and god rays work as intended.

Have you reported that ? are the developers aware ?

[cl333r]

This announcement explains it all.

TL;DR: The relevant part:

The AMD OpenGL and Vulkan drivers currently use a shader compiler that is part of the upstream LLVM project. That project is massive, and has many different goals, with online compilation of game shaders only being one of them. That can result in development tradeoffs, where improving gaming-specific functionality is harder than it otherwise would, or where gaming-specific features would often accidentally get broken by LLVM developers working on other things. In particular, shader compilation speed is one such example: it's not really a critical factor in most other scenarios, just a nice-to-have. But for gaming, compile time is critical, and slow shader compilation can result in near-unplayable stutter.

[R41N3R]

Getting ACO by default in RADV is a great milestone as it really makes a huge difference for users sticking to the defaults!

[mazumoto]

So, does that get ACO to the point that LLVM is not needed at all anymore?
Up until now I was under the impression that ACO only replaced compilation for certain shaders, not all of them (and for those LLVM would still be used).