Nouveau NIR Support Slated To Land In Mesa 19.1 Over The Days Ahead

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau NIR Support Slated To Land In Mesa 19.1 Over The Days Ahead

The work done by Red Hat's Karol Herbst over the past year for plumbing in NIR intermediate representation support within the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Gallium3D driver will finally be landing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-NIR-Landing

[uid313]

Why use NIR instead of SPIR-V?

[karolherbst]

Why use NIR instead of SPIR-V?

to maintain and write a proper SPIR-V consumer is a lot more harder than just dealing with NIR and we have our SPIR-V to NIR code inside mesa already which is well maintained.

[FireBurn]

Why use NIR instead of SPIR-V?

There was a really good blog post explaining this, it boiled down to NIR is a lot easier to optimize and can be converted into SPIR-V fairly easily

[karolherbst]

There was a really good blog post explaining this, it boiled down to NIR is a lot easier to optimize and can be converted into SPIR-V fairly easily

just that there is literally no reason to convert NIR to SPIR-V. But it's much easier to convert NIR to your driver IR than spir-v to your driver IR. Also with NIR you can cover like everything you need inside mesa: glsl, SPIR-V, d3d9 and ARB shaders.

[cl333r]

just that there is literally no reason to convert NIR to SPIR-V. But it's much easier to convert NIR to your driver IR than spir-v to your driver IR. Also with NIR you can cover like everything you need inside mesa: glsl, SPIR-V, d3d9 and ARB shaders.

Wait but isn't SPIR-V meant to give some type of cross-platform benefit, isn't it supposed to be the communication format between various Khronos standards?

[karolherbst]

Wait but isn't SPIR-V meant to give some type of cross-platform benefit, isn't it supposed to be the communication format between various Khronos standards?

sure, but still, why would you convert _NIR_ to SPIR-V? NIR is mesa internal only and an IR which is supposed to be consumed by drivers only, not used for anything else.

[nanonyme]

NIR is made by a intel summer worker. So because of intel we have many shading language conversions that slows down. This is the strategy of wintel conspiracy, to implement slow software to boost CPU sales.

With all due respect, are you high right now? If you're not, please avoid that level of sarcasm to be more friendly to forum newbies.

[nanonyme]

Wait but isn't SPIR-V meant to give some type of cross-platform benefit, isn't it supposed to be the communication format between various Khronos standards?

It is and it does. Games and other applications using Vulkan should not care anything about driver IR's regardless of platform but just use SPIR-V which gets converted by driver internally to whatever makes sense for the hardware backend.

[karolherbst]

nanonyme just ignore that person....