Nouveau Switches Over To NIR Backend By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Switches Over To NIR Backend By Default

As part of Mesa preparing to drop its old GLSL to TGSI code path and routing more Mesa drivers through using the NIR intermediate representation, the Nouveau Gallium3D driver code has switched to using this modern IR by default...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-NIR-Default

[mobin_leckest]

very well!
This promises better performance (even a few percent!) On Nvidia's newer graphics cards.
I checked this with the NV167 and saw performance improvements (both in-game and in the glmark2 test)
Now a question is on my mind: Is it possible that we will see a Vulkan driver for nouveau in the near future?

[gnarlin]

Nothing that happens with the Nouveau driver ultimately matters until Nvidia deigns to permit our filthy peasant hands to handle and share their super duper sikrit gpu firmwares. The Nouveau developers are kings, specifically Sisyphuses and Nvidia is Hades.

[nanonyme]

Cool stuff. Seems NIR migration is progressing well.

[Draget]

While I like the performance boosts if there are any, the really cool thing is the de-cluttering and 'simplification' of the whole stack. Using NIR directly instead of the outdated TGSI also simplifies things, help to share improvements made made on one level across the board for all drivers.

I am really happy how mesa is progressing in the last years. Especially thanks to people like Anholt, Blumenkranz and many more recently active people.