Mesa Zink Change Leads To 50% Reduction In Memory Utilization

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Zink Change Leads To 50% Reduction In Memory Utilization

A rather profound change is pending for Mesa 23.1 that should lead to this OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver's memory utilization being cut in half for most games without negatively impacting the performance and likely closing a number of bugs in the process...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Zink-Serialize-All-NIR

[Sethox]

Mike's blog is such a good one:

What will I do with the rest of my 256GiB RAM?
Open two more browser tabs.

Still, the compression of RAM usage is impressive. This is what happens when the limitation hits the roof, innovation for better compression.

[caligula]

Mike's blog is such a good one:

Jokes aside, current HTML5 web apps are among the most complex business applications ever written. Cloud object storage supports almost infinite amounts of data, huge amount of parallelism, even web packed client bundle can be tens of hundreds of megabytes of pure code and assets. Also most pages consist of tens of screenfuls of rendered content. Serializing a 32bit 4k prerendered image + triple buffering ain't cheap. That doesn't include cached assets, compiled shaders etc. Games are much simpler.

[Dark-Show]

Love this guys blog, so fun to read. Can't wait to compile and test these changes out on the Pi4. Hit an issue recently using box86 to emulate Civ4. For trying to squeeze a bit more performance out of some games Zink works great (Simpson's Hit & Run / GTA:VC), but with this particular game it hit the memory limit and crashed shortly after loading a game and moving around a bit.

[Mitch]

I'm really fascinated by the compression bit. Reminds me of how the early Gameboy Pokemon games used compression due to the tiny cartridge space. Gen 1 used RLE I think and Gen 2 got rewritten by Nintendo's late president, Satoru Iwata, to speed up decompression at the cost of ratio.

(I know it's reddit, but the poster cites everything)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/hwlylf/while_it_is_true_that_iwata_did_write_a_new/

[direc85]

Wasn't that ~80% reduction?

[Dark-Show]

Wasn't that ~80% reduction?

I think the remaining percentages were for another bug in RADV that he applied a seperate already finished patch too.

"That’s right, these graphs are still being hit by the now-fixed RADV shader IR ballooning."

[rmoog]

What a Chad!