Nouveau NVC0 Shader Disk Cache Lands For Speeding Up Game Load Times

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau NVC0 Shader Disk Cache Lands For Speeding Up Game Load Times

Covered back in February was work for Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver to finalle make use of the Mesa on-disk shader cache functionality for speeding up game load times by allowing previously compiled GLSL shaders to be cached to disk. That work by Red Hat has finally been mainlined in Mesa 20.3...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-Mesa-20.3-Shader-Cache

[ix900]

"it went from taking over three minutes to now just 23 seconds" Weird. I don't get why now instead of before or whatever. That makes no sense that no one was checking if it needed to be running every single time if its that expensive. Literally zero sense. Maybe negative sense lol.

At least someone now did it.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Phoronix: Nouveau NVC0 Shader Disk Cache Lands For Speeding Up Game Load Times

Covered back in February was work for Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver to finalle make use of the Mesa on-disk shader cache functionality for speeding up game load times by allowing previously compiled GLSL shaders to be cached to disk. That work by Red Hat has finally been mainlined in Mesa 20.3...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...3-Shader-Cache

[pipe13]

"it went from taking over three minutes to now just 23 seconds" Weird. I don't get why now instead of before or whatever. That makes no sense that no one was checking if it needed to be running every single time if its that expensive. Literally zero sense. Maybe negative sense lol.

At least someone now did it.

'Cept it doesn't need to be running every single time. 'Cuz it's only that expensive for those who are actively trying to game Nouveau. And they have more serious problems.

[piorunz]

Fantastic, all three games that actually work on nouveau will now load faster. All other thousands of games are unavailable due to nouveau being work in progress.

[ix900]

'Cept it doesn't need to be running every single time. 'Cuz it's only that expensive for those who are actively trying to game Nouveau. And they have more serious problems.

That is horribly true lol.

[Alexmitter]

Could someone explain what is actually the issue with the signed firmware in this case, other drivers for other hardware also use signed firmware.

[starshipeleven]

Fantastic, all three games that actually work on nouveau will now load faster. All other thousands of games are unavailable due to nouveau being work in progress.

*NVIDIA not releasing firmware

[starshipeleven]

Could someone explain what is actually the issue with the signed firmware in this case, other drivers for other hardware also use signed firmware.

Other drivers for other hardware use firmware that was released with a license that allows free distribution of the blob (for obvious reasons) and is in linux-firmware repositories.

NVIDIA did not release the firmware for initializing the GPU beyond "basic 3D mode at low clock speed" so whatever you get is illegal to redistribute, and extracting it from the blob driver package (like it was done in the past) is not possible due to how it is bundled and manipulated before loading into the GPU, the only way was a hacked kernel that can intercept it when it is loaded in the GPU, and this is a too complex process to be done by every end user of the driver.
While also it would piss off NVIDIA so anyone providing tooling to do that will be a target for lawsuits.

Similar to VBIOS and other things like that, where the graphic bios on flash is modified by the UEFI before loading it in the GPU and won't work without these modifications so you need to extract the VBIOS from a running system, you cannot just read the one in flash.