Compute Shader development status

[TheOneKEA]

Thanks for the info everyone. I had heard of the Mesa Matrix before but I never really understood what it was trying to describe.

[agd5f]

The shader compiler and hw setup is already implemented for clover. It just needs to be plumbed up to the GL compute extensions. That said, it's not particularly useful until shader buffer and image support is implemented. Most of that has to be done in gallium and can be shared between gallium drivers.

[haagch]

I've seen that imirkin has a branch for nouveau: https://github.com/imirkin/mesa/comm...compute_shader

For radeon I'd be interested in the status too, I haven't seen anything.

[bridgman]

It's worth taking a look at https://mesamatrix.net/ in addition to RadeonFeature.

If you look at GL 4.3 you'll see that compute shaders are one of a handful of remaining features that need to be supported in order to claim GL 4.3 support. In addition I believe there is at least one recently released Linux game which requires them (I think there are two but not sure) so it will help there as well.

Support for compute shaders was recently added to the Intel driver (you can see the 2015-12-10 date stamps), and IIRC other folks have been working on the radeon/nouveau drivers... generally once the first driver has a feature working the other drivers pick it up fairly quickly afterwards.

[TheOneKEA]

I was reviewing the RadeonFeature web page on X.org to see the current state of driver support for the Southern Islands chips (I have a Cape Verde HD 7770) and I noticed that compute shaders are still shown as a TODO item for my chip as well as a lot of other chips. Where's the best place to look to learn about any ongoing efforts to develop compute shader support for these chips and how big a difference in performance or OpenGL compliance will it make once it is working?