The Old Radeon "R600" Open-Source Gallium3D Driver Now Enables SPIR-V

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Old Radeon "R600" Open-Source Gallium3D Driver Now Enables SPIR-V

The open-source R600 Gallium3D driver for supporting up through the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards on Linux has an interesting new year addition... ARB_gl_spirv!..

https://www.phoronix.com/news/R600g-SPIR-V-ARB_gl_spirv

[direc85]

R600 is a prime example of what software-side support can do to a product! By the looks of it, it's actually reaching the hardware limitations, which is - eventually - the optimal point to stop

[baryluk]

Nice.

But, are there any apps or 3D engines using `ARB_gl_spirv` in the wild?

[coder]

are there any apps or 3D engines using `ARB_gl_spirv` in the wild?

9k hits, on github:

https://github.com/search?q=ARB_gl_spirv&type=code

I'll let you sift through them and see if any are in apps or 3D engines.

[baryluk]

9k hits, on github:

https://github.com/search?q=ARB_gl_spirv&type=code

I'll let you sift through them and see if any are in apps or 3D engines.

Just looks like forks of mesa, intel compiler and generic libraries to support OpenGL. Not a single real use of `ARB_gl_spriv` there. Not even a demo app.

[marlock]

I'm gonna place a blind bet on game engines, but maybe this is so recent a feature in OpenGL that the engines didn't care enough to implement it because there's already wide enough vulkan coverage that this isn't trully necessary

In any case there is a small chance this helps weirder stuff like Zync or Rusticl going forward, and dude might just be having fun doing this and learning a lot from it.

Would this help OpenGL ES too at some point in the furure?

ps: while github is huge, it doesn't contain the entire opensource world... nor does it contain the code pertaining closed-source engines and such, so there might be some other uses we're just not seeing on that search

[Developer12]

I expect this is a crucial step along the way to getting rusticl to support these cards, which is pretty much the last big blocker before clover can be removed and rusticl can become the default mesa openCL implementation.

[coder]

Would this help OpenGL ES too at some point in the future?

First, ES would need to have an analogous extension. Does it?

[Veerappan]

I expect this is a crucial step along the way to getting rusticl to support these cards, which is pretty much the last big blocker before clover can be removed and rusticl can become the default mesa openCL implementation.

You might be on to something there. SPIR-V ingestion is pretty much needed for rusticl and newer OpenCL versions. Being able to get SPIR-V working in R600 helps rusticl, helps GL, and may also make it easier to get a vulkan driver going someday (if it's feasible on this hardware, and if there's motivation).

[gururise]

Exciting. Testament to the power of open source!