R600/RadeonSI GLSL/TGSI On-Disk Shader Cache Revised

[PadreAdamo]

What are the implications of this with Wine gaming?

[schmidtbag]

PC and laptops with Richland still sold. Even today. Yep, I just checked.

Also 6850/6870 owners still can play all games that was released for Linux last month.

I'm not saying those GPUs shouldn't be used; I'm aware they're still pretty good. I'm just saying by the time they can be a major focus again, the market for them will shrink to the point where they're not worth the time and investment.

@pal666
The difference is r600 doesn't have a viable alternative, while radv does. If I were using radv and support for it dropped, I would be fine with using amdgpu-pro, even if I lost a few FPS. The fact that amdgpu-pro is currently closed source is irrelevant to me personally. If I were using r600 and support for it dropped, my only other option is fglrx, which isn't really better. In other words, I personally feel r600 needs to be a higher priority, because more people will benefit from it getting attention. This is coming from someone who would benefit from the completion of radv and does not own any r600 products.

[pal666]

He put way too much time and effort into RADV to give up on it now, especially considering the performance and progress of it is very promising.

he also put much time and effort into r600 and its performance and progress is even better. and nobody else is working on it, while vulkan has large team of windows devs

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Unfortunately, I'm guessing by the time they could get to r600 again, nobody will be using those GPUs anymore.

PC and laptops with Richland still sold. Even today. Yep, I just checked.

Also 6850/6870 owners still can play all games that was released for Linux last month.

[schmidtbag]

maybe they will opensource vulkan and airlied will return to r600

That'd be nice, I think that is equally as unlikely as my original statement. Despite nouveau needing Vulkan support and AMD's plans (albeit, uselessly vague) to open source their Vulkan drivers, Arlie worked on RADV anyway. He put way too much time and effort into RADV to give up on it now, especially considering the performance and progress of it is very promising.

[pal666]

Maybe if AMD makes enough money from Ryzen or Polaris, they could hire a driver dev dedicated for older GPUs. Wishful thinking I suppose...

maybe they will opensource vulkan and airlied will return to r600

[nomadewolf]

Maybe if AMD makes enough money from Ryzen or Polaris...

Why not both?

[schmidtbag]

I no longer have any r600 hardware but it's still nice to see it get some attention. It's been a while.

Maybe someone will complete OpenGL and OpenGL support for r600g after all?

I think the AMD devs would like to but they don't have the time. They still have a lot to get done with radeonSI, amdgpu(-pro), and Polaris in general. But, at least they're making a lot of progress with those very quickly. Unfortunately, I'm guessing by the time they could get to r600 again, nobody will be using those GPUs anymore.

Maybe if AMD makes enough money from Ryzen or Polaris, they could hire a driver dev dedicated for older GPUs. Wishful thinking I suppose...

[shanefagan]

He doesn't work at Collabora anymore this work was done after he left. It's nice to get some kudos but I think maybe the article should be updated, he works at Valve now working on the AMD drivers and SteamOS according to LinkedIn

[brent]

How much compile time is really saved by skipping GLSL->TGSI step? My guess would be that TGSI->binary is the expensive part. Some benchmark numbers would be interesting.

Parsing GLSL is quite expensive and so are the various GLSL optimization passes. So depending on the game, this can have some nice benefits.