22 Patches From AMD Further Along Mesa's Workstation Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 22 Patches From AMD Further Along Mesa's Workstation Performance

Well known Mesa developer Marek Olšák has for years meticulously optimized the RadeonSI driver and before that R600g and R300g where he got his start as a student developer. Besides ensuring the AMD Radeon OpenGL performance is in great shape for Linux gaming, he's also spent much time more recently in focusing on workstation OpenGL performance and with that the common SPECViewPerf benchmark. This week he landed another set of patches providing around a 7.5% improvement for one of the SPECViewPerf tests...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-VAO-Better-SPECViewPerf

[Azpegath]

Since VBOs and VAOs are a part of "modern" OpenGL as well, this could yield a nice return on all games, as well, I assume?

[M@GOid]

Heard AMD started to improve their Windows OpenGL driver. I wonder if they borrowed any code from the Linux side.

[schmidtbag]

Heard AMD started to improve their Windows OpenGL driver. I wonder if they borrowed any code from the Linux side.

Not only have they improved it, it's actually good for what might be the first time ever. Kinda stupid, considering OpenGL is largely obsolete now (particularly in Windows).

[timofonic]

Not only have they improved it, it's actually good for what might be the first time ever. Kinda stupid, considering OpenGL is largely obsolete now (particularly in Windows).

AMD is so fast at driver development, it amuses me...

[user1]

Nobody is talking about it, but It's interesting that despite all the recent RadeonSi workstation performance optimizations, that new better optimized Windows OpenGL driver (called OGLP) is actually available as part of amdgpu-pro. I wonder what for?

[cb88]

Heard AMD started to improve their Windows OpenGL driver. I wonder if they borrowed any code from the Linux side.

Its very unlikely, I think there is some code sharing in the GPU driver itself, but the new OpenGL implementation is written on top of AMD's DX11 framework update.

[user1]

Its very unlikely, I think there is some code sharing in the GPU driver itself, but the new OpenGL implementation is written on top of AMD's DX11 framework update.

That was some early speculation which has already been disproven by someone from AMD. The new driver is based on PAL (like Vulkan and DX12). In fact "OGLP" is probably an acronym of OpenGL PAL. I also don't think it shares code with Mesa, since these are 2 wildly different codebases.

[JacekJagosz]

Heard AMD started to improve their Windows OpenGL driver. I wonder if they borrowed any code from the Linux side.

I kind of does, when the driver with big gains in OpenGL came out people noticed the shader compiler is different, it went from AMD's propietary to LLVM. The binary got much bigger and shader compilation times longer, but we finally got more sharing between Windows and Open Source.
Funny that on linux for a few years LLVM has been the worse compiler, with a ton of effort going into ACO, and yet LLVM was still better for Windows. But I get while ACO is more focused and better for gaming, LLVM is used by AMD for everything, not just gaming but also compute, a basis for ROCm.

[coder]

I also don't think it shares code with Mesa, since these are 2 wildly different codebases.

Is Mesa GPL/LGPL? If so, and AMD did borrow any code from it, they'd have to (L)GPL significant portions of their windows userspace driver.