RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Adds GL_KHR_shader_subgroup Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Adds GL_KHR_shader_subgroup Support

It's not too often these days seeing new OpenGL extensions come to Mesa drivers given their already robust coverage and not many new OpenGL extensions being introduced compared to the still-expanding Vulkan APIs. Overnight though RadeonSI Gallium3D saw GL_KHR_shader_subgroup support land...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RadeonSI-GL_KHR_shader_subgroup

[ahrs]

Two years ago it was asked for Mesa drivers to support the KHR_shader_subgroup extension since the NVIDIA driver does and is needed for running a compute rasterizer demo. One month ago another user noted this extension would help them in their efforts.

So they implemented a whole OpenGL extension just for a demo application? Hurray for Open Source development! I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Are there any other real consumers of this extension in the wild?

[smitty3268]

So they implemented a whole OpenGL extension just for a demo application? Hurray for Open Source development! I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Are there any other real consumers of this extension in the wild?

It was added by an AMD employee, so OSS doesn't have much to do with it. I doubt it would be present in their proprietary drivers or Intel's windows drivers if no one was using it, but certainly nobody is using it for gaming or widespread desktop applications if that's your question.

[aceman]

So they implemented a whole OpenGL extension just for a demo application? Hurray for Open Source development! I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Are there any other real consumers of this extension in the wild?

Maybe there was some need for the functionality otherwise the extension wouldn't be added to the spec in the first place (nobody would invent it). Maybe the users are not known but they must exists somewhere. Maybe on Windows most probably.