Mesa 20.2 RADV Driver Flips On ACO By Default For Quicker Game Load Times, Better Performance

[xxmitsu]

can we port ACO to the old intel driver ?

ACO stands for AmdCOmpiler. It is too GCN specific to be ported to other vendors. See: https://github.com/daniel-schuermann/mesa/issues/98

Intel has something similar in the pipeline called IBC - IntelBackendCompiler. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...C-New-Back-End

When I've first heard about the abbreviation, I was thinking how ABC instead of ACO would have sounded. Amd backed compiler

[Etherman]

I'm willing to look like an idiot. Isn't AMDGPU just the open source parts of AMDGPU-pro? I am working on my GL composited KDE desktop and don't have ether a GL or Vulkan driver loaded. What I do have loaded is AMDGPU.

I think the amdgpu driver you're referring to might be the xorg display driver.

http://manpages.org/amdgpu/4

[bridgman]

I'm willing to look like an idiot. Isn't AMDGPU just the open source parts of AMDGPU-pro? I am working on my GL composited KDE desktop and don't have ether a GL or Vulkan driver loaded. What I do have loaded is AMDGPU.

I do see people calling the all-open version of the AMDGPU-PRO packaged drivers "AMDGPU" and it is sorta-correct but also can be confusing. There are a dozen or so components that make up the graphics stack for a GPU, and the "amdgpu" name is used in a few of those places:

Kernel drivers - "radeon" supports from R100 through CI (and is default for all of those generations) while "amdgpu" supports from SI through latest and is default for VI and up

Userspace wrapper for kernel driver - "libdrm-amdgpu" is the default

X drivers - "amdgpu" supports from SI through latest, while "modesetting" supports any hardware that uses kernel modesetting and offers and OpenGL driver for drawing... different distros have different defaults IIRC

OpenGL driver - "radeonsi" is the open source driver in Mesa; the closed source OpenGL driver doesn't really have a name although AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL is commonly used

Vulkan driver - AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan is probably the closest thing to a proper name for the closed source version; AMDVLK is often used for the open-sourced version of the closed source driver, while RADV is the community-developed open source driver in Mesa

A number of driver components use a shader compiler; typically the upper layers of the shader compiler are a bit API-specific, while the bottom layer (aka back end) is shared between components. The llvm back-end for our hardware is also called "amdgpu" (technically it's the amdgpu target) while another community-developed backend is called "ACO".

Different tools are used to find out which driver is being used for each of the components, so when you say "what I have loaded is XYZ" it's important to say how you determined what was loaded.

Not sure if this helps or makes things worse

[MadeUpName]

Thanks agd5f and bridgman. That helps a lot.

[flubba86]

I used to use Padoka PPA for latest Mesa builds on Ubuntu, but that hasn't been updated since January. I just updated to Ubuntu 20.04 last week, and looking for another PPA with fresh Mesa, what do people use these days?

EDIT: found this one, looks good https://launchpad.net/%7Ekisak/+arch...ntu/kisak-mesa

[anth]

can we port ACO to the old intel driver ?

No. ACO is used for the final, hardware specific, shader compilation stage. It replaces LLVM but Intel have never used that, other than experimenting with it briefly a few years ago. Intel are working on a replacement for their final stage compiler too, but their current one doesn't have the compile time and release cycle issues which replacing LLVM with ACO is meant to solve.

[JustinTurdeau]

Michael Why are you still linking Mesa articles to cgit.freedesktop.org when their infrastructure has long since moved to gitlab.freedesktop.org?

[CochainComplex]

I used to use Padoka PPA for latest Mesa builds on Ubuntu, but that hasn't been updated since January. I just updated to Ubuntu 20.04 last week, and looking for another PPA with fresh Mesa, what do people use these days?

EDIT: found this one, looks good https://launchpad.net/%7Ekisak/+arch...ntu/kisak-mesa

try oibaf https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archiv...aphics-drivers he is doing a good job. btw he builds mesa ith newer llvm as stock and lto flag is applied by default

[oleid]

I really welcome that ACO is finally enabled by default! I use almost since its first release and it always worked better for me than LLVM

It was measurably faster for me, too. I tried piet-gpu, a vulkan-based compute-centric 2D GPU renderer.

[andre30correia]

For RADV you have backends (compilers)
- LLVM (AMD official)
- ACO (community)

Previously for all above LLVM was default backend, now for RADV it's ACO

ACO community? is not valve?