RadeonSI Driver Switches To NIR, Thereby Enabling OpenGL 4.6 By Default For AMD GPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Driver Switches To NIR, Thereby Enabling OpenGL 4.6 By Default For AMD GPUs

Mesa 20.0 due out in Q1'2020 is now the magical release that is set to switch on RadeonSI NIR usage by default in place of the TGSI intermediate representation. What makes this IR switch-over prominent is that OpenGL 4.6 is then enabled by default on this open-source Gallium3D driver supporting Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RadeonSI-Defaults-To-NIR

[LeJimster]

This is nice to see. I might be plucking this out thin air, but I thought I read NIR was needed for Valves ACO to support OpenGL. Eitherway, the performance benefits and feature support of NIR are welcome.

Does this mean mesa has full OpenGL support for the first time?

[rhysk]

Does this mean mesa has full OpenGL support for the first time?

i965 and iris are both already conformant OpenGL 4.6 implementations, as will be shipping in Mesa 19.3.

[Marco-GG]

This is nice to see. I might be plucking this out thin air, but I thought I read NIR was needed for Valves ACO to support OpenGL. Eitherway, the performance benefits and feature support of NIR are welcome.

Does this mean mesa has full OpenGL support for the first time?

If you mean for OpenGL Core profiles, then Intel got there first.

The last three years has been amazing for feature development on Intel and RadeonSI drivers. Many kudos to all the devs that has been part of this!!

[StandaSK]

Will the TGSI path get removed eventually? (or is this not how any of this works? :P sorry, am a noob)

[R41N3R]

Great, just went ahead and enabled it for myself, all test worked perfectly fine in the last weeks.

[microcode]

Will the TGSI path get removed eventually? (or is this not how any of this works? :P sorry, am a noob)

That's not a dumb question. Most of the drivers now use NIR, it seems, so it's likely that TGSI will be factored out.

[Kayden]

virgl and vmware's stuff still use TGSI, so it's not likely to go away completely. But it certainly seems like it's getting shuffled off to irrelevance, and that's a good thing IMO.

I'm really glad to see basically all of Mesa unified on a single IR now.

[Veerappan]

That's not a dumb question. Most of the drivers now use NIR, it seems, so it's likely that TGSI will be factored out.

Depends on the API. Vulkan and OpenGL both have NIR support, but things like vdpau and va-api don't (to my recollection). Clover has some support for ingesting SPIRV shaders and translating to NIR, but compiling from CL source programs for radeonsi/r600 still requires clang/llvm to work.

I also don't remember which IRs the nine state tracker requires, but d9vk might make that less of an issue than it once would've been.

[shmerl]

things like vdpau and va-api don't (to my recollection).

vaapi is using TGSI?