The Shiny New Features Of Mesa 18.3 For Open-Source Intel / Radeon Graphics Drivers

[perpetually high]

I've been messing around with both LLVM 7 and LLVM 8 with Mesa 18.3 and I'm finding 7 is the one to go with. LLVM 8 and git-master (19.0-devel) seem to be the more appropriate pairing.

AFAIK, to get LLVM 7/Mesa 18.3, you'll have to build it yourself.

oibaf ppa = Mesa 19.0-devel + LLVM 7
padoka ppa = Mesa 19.0-devel + LLVM 8

[clapbr]

I've been messing around with both LLVM 7 and LLVM 8 with Mesa 18.3 and I'm finding 7 is the one to go with. LLVM 8 and git-master (19.0-devel) seem to be the more appropriate pairing.

AFAIK, to get LLVM 7/Mesa 18.3, you'll have to build it yourself.

oibaf ppa = Mesa 19.0-devel + LLVM 7
padoka ppa = Mesa 19.0-devel + LLVM 8

Interesting, I was planning to downgrade my llvm from 8 (svn) to 7 to test exactly that but didn't have time yet. Did you find noticeable performance difference between them?

[perpetually high]

Interesting, I was planning to downgrade my llvm from 8 (svn) to 7 to test exactly that but didn't have time yet. Did you find noticeable performance difference between them?

I don't have any concrete numbers so I'm hesitant to say one way or another but I found performance to be smoother with LLVM 7 in certain games, but again, nothing substantive to back up my claim.

If you have the time, definitely try the downgrade for yourself. I'm curious if you find similar results.

I had the drivers in /opt/mesa-18.3-llvm8 and /opt/mesa-18.3-llvm7 so I could easily swap between the two using the LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH and EGL_DRIVERS_PATH environment variables before launching the game.

e.g. LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/opt/mesa-18.3-llvm7/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu EGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/opt/mesa-18.3-llvm7/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu ./game

[marek]

Michael EXT_gpu_shader4 is actually not yet supported. I haven't pushed the commits yet. Somebody needs to write piglit tests first.

[clapbr]

I don't have any concrete numbers so I'm hesitant to say one way or another but I found performance to be smoother with LLVM 7 in certain games, but again, nothing substantive to back up my claim.

If you have the time, definitely try the downgrade for yourself. I'm curious if you find similar results.

I had the drivers in /opt/mesa-18.3-llvm8 and /opt/mesa-18.3-llvm7 so I could easily swap between the two using the LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH and EGL_DRIVERS_PATH environment variables before launching the game.

e.g. LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/opt/mesa-18.3-llvm7/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu EGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/opt/mesa-18.3-llvm7/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu ./game

Ran a couple benchmarks, difference was less than ~2fps so negligible. Regarding smoothness, I tried a few games and couldn't notice a difference. Not worth changing from one to another imo. That may change at any point though (I'm specially interested in the llvm shader compiler improvements for radv they promised since the closed vulkan driver still has the edge in a lot of cases).

[perpetually high]

Ran a couple benchmarks, difference was less than ~2fps so negligible. Regarding smoothness, I tried a few games and couldn't notice a difference. Not worth changing from one to another imo. That may change at any point though (I'm specially interested in the llvm shader compiler improvements for radv they promised since the closed vulkan driver still has the edge in a lot of cases).

I see, good to know- thanks for following up!

[pete910]

In a performance standpoint? No - Vulkan will have little to no advantage. However, we're reaching a point where applications are Vulkan-only. So, until a Vulkan-to-OGL converter is readily available, some of these people will be left out. Haswell may have a weak IGP but it's fine for low-detail games, or, games where frame rate doesn't really matter.

Good point. I was thinking purely as for gaming use

[Yae8xahch]

As I'm registered to Phoronix now, I would like to say that...

I really would like to see progress being made in the nouveau area.

From kernel to userland. For what should aim at an alternative to the proprietary NVidia blob, this is really sad. The development of nouveau mesa, libdrm and kernel has actually just stalled for month. There's no progress. I would even pay money to have someone sit at nouveau mesa and fix and extend stuff.

Read the ChangeLogs... there has nothing essentially happended at the NVidia hardware front for Linux in the recent months.