Igalia Is Working On "mediump" Support For Mesa To Help With OpenGL ES Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Igalia Is Working On "mediump" Support For Mesa To Help With OpenGL ES Performance

Igalia is working on supporting OpenGL ES' GLSL marking of variables as "mediump" when the precision involving those variables can be lowered to half-float 16-bit registers. That in turn can help with performance when honoring that precision marking, which to date Mesa has ignored...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-GLES-Mediump

[shmerl]

Didn't Google plan to drop native OpenGL support in favor of OpenGL → Vulkan translation on Android?

[Guest]

Interesting! I wonder if we'll see upstream open source GPU drivers on Pixel and Chrombeook devices in the future. That would be awesome!

[bpeel]

The article says that the pass is on the NIR representation, but just to clarify, the main pass is on the IR tree. As mentioned in the talk, the pass to find which operations can be done in mediump has to be done at the highest level possible in order to have an accurate representation of how the expressions looked in the original GLSL source. The conversion to NIR might end up transforming the operations in such a way that it’s no longer possible to determine which variables were the operands of which operation so it might make the wrong decisions about the precision.

[Calinou]

Didn't Google plan to drop native OpenGL support in favor of OpenGL → Vulkan translation on Android?

I don't know, but it will take a while before all Android devices on the market support Vulkan well. There's still a fair amount of devices that support only OpenGL ES 2.0 as of writing: https://developer.android.com/about/...rds/index.html

(Keep in mind many devices that support GLES 3.0 also don't support Vulkan.)

[pal666]

Didn't Google plan to drop native OpenGL support in favor of OpenGL → Vulkan translation on Android?

it's not necessarily for android. chromeos team is more open than android one

[fuzz]

Didn't Google plan to drop native OpenGL support in favor of OpenGL → Vulkan translation on Android?

This like PostmarketOS will use this too.

[tildearrow]

Didn't Google plan to drop native OpenGL support in favor of OpenGL → Vulkan translation on Android?

What, really?
At least it's good they're not dropping it. Hopefully Apple will learn from this.

[carewolf]

Reminds me of too many places highp is used where mediump or lowp would suffice, especially for colors.