RADV Driver Enables Graphics Pipeline Library Support By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RADV Driver Enables Graphics Pipeline Library Support By Default

In time for the upcoming Mesa 23.1 branching and feature freeze, Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has enabled the graphics pipeline library "GPL" support by default with the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-GPL-Mesa-23.1-Default

[RejectModernity]

Intel, wtf have you been doing for a year????

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15637

[HD7950]

I've been using mesa-git for the last weeks and GPL just works. Bye, bye stupid Steam shader cache.

[user1]

I've been using mesa-git for the last weeks and GPL just works. Bye, bye stupid Steam shader cache.

That's what I'm hoping the most from GPL. I mean even without GPL I already experience pretty much stutter free gaming thanks to ACO as well, but I'm so glad GPL will finally put an end to those gigabytes of shader downloads that waste disk space (also with the often buggy behavior of downloading them all over again each time Steam starts) and then waiting for them to compile before starting the game.

[skeevy420]

That's what I'm hoping the most from GPL. I mean even without GPL I already experience pretty much stutter free gaming thanks to ACO as well, but I'm so glad GPL will finally put an end to those gigabytes of shader downloads that waste disk space (also with the often buggy behavior of downloading them all over again each time Steam starts) and then waiting for them to compile before starting the game.

For the love of God, THAT. Very, very annoying behavior when you have a metered home internet provider (contract is up next Feb). Especially so when it ends up being moot when the game compiles its own shaders anyways. WTF was the point?!?

Even worse, when it's a game like Hogwarts Legacy that's buggy AF so it compiles the shaders every single time you launch the game.

It genuinely makes me wonder how much electricity I'm wasting when I launch poorly programmed games and use poorly programmed launchers just dealing with shaders.

[geearf]

Does the game need to use that extension explicitly? If so is it only helpful for old titles with DXVK/VK3D?

[ryao]

Does the game need to use that extension explicitly? If so is it only helpful for old titles with DXVK/VK3D?

My understanding is that this exists to reduce the permutation space for shaders to prevent compilation stutter. That is mainly a problem for porting games that use D3D9/10/11 or OpenGL, which have incremental shader compilation that interacts very poorly with the "no incremental compilation" models of Vulkan or D3D12. Games designed natively for Vulkan or D3D12 should have no need for it since they do not do incremental shader compilation.

I am not a graphics expert, so if a real expert comes, please ignore this in favor of what the actual expert says.

[geearf]

My understanding is that this exists to reduce the permutation space for shaders to prevent compilation stutter. That is mainly a problem for porting games that use D3D9/10/11 or OpenGL, which have incremental shader compilation that interacts very poorly with the "no incremental compilation" models of Vulkan or D3D12. Games designed natively for Vulkan or D3D12 should have no need for it since they do not do incremental shader compilation.

I am not a graphics expert, so if a real expert comes, please ignore this in favor of what the actual expert says.

I appreciate this, thank you!

[stormcrow]

I've been using mesa-git for the last weeks and GPL just works. Bye, bye stupid Steam shader cache.

I don't think I've bought anything from Steam in about 18 months. I've just waited for GOG versions to be able to ignore Steam's annoying quirks. I've even repurchased the games I played most on Steam on GOG (on deep discount sales of course) just to be able to keep the Linux system Steam free. That means I don't have to worry about i386 packages for backwards compatibility going forward since Valve has stubbornly refused to update their legacy storefront software despite it being something like 18 years since 64 bit desktop CPUs were released even with all the pushes from the major distro publishers lately. I'm just "over Valve and Steam" at this point. If the game doesn't show up elsewhere (like GOG, Twitch.io, etc) I just won't buy it.

[ryao]

I appreciate this, thank you!

It turns out that I was wrong about D3D12 software not benefiting from this. VKD3D-Proton uses GPL for some edge cases according to this comment:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15637#note_1860411