Mesa 24.2 Released With New Vulkan Extensions, New Shader Cache

[Rovano]

Sorry but I actually found the real reason for this rollback of the mesa version, and the above answer is incorrect. Correct answer found here for anyone else wondering why this might be happening:

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1228164

basically they found a bug in mesa 24.1.4 related to video in vlc - and rolling it back to 24.1.3 fixes it, so that's why they did it. 24.1.5 should be coming soon so best just to wait for that.

Also just a comment on your repo priorities, both the opensuse official and packman repos have the exact same version.
https://repology.org/project/mesa/versions

np, I assumed that the Internet is flooded with the same questions about downgrading OpenSuse packages.
When I look at mine, I also have the lower version.

VLC is sometimes problematic with Packman. I don't use it.

[Jarmer]

Wrong system settings in repositories. Priorities. Google it.
But I warn you. Thick new software from other repositories is unstable.

Sorry but I actually found the real reason for this rollback of the mesa version, and the above answer is incorrect. Correct answer found here for anyone else wondering why this might be happening:

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1228164

basically they found a bug in mesa 24.1.4 related to video in vlc - and rolling it back to 24.1.3 fixes it, so that's why they did it. 24.1.5 should be coming soon so best just to wait for that.

Also just a comment on your repo priorities, both the opensuse official and packman repos have the exact same version.

https://repology.org/project/mesa/versions

[Rovano]

I'm on Opensuse Tumbleweed, so I use the Packman repos for all things media related due to the dumb copyright codec stuff that plagues so many distros. They recently downgraded Mesa from 24.1.4 to 24.1.3 so now my entire system wants to do a downgrade whenever I run the update utility (which on a rolling distro is often!) - does anyone by chance know why this happened? I have been looking but can't find any info anywhere!! Maybe due to instability? Just not sure.

Last time I did a downgrade like this with an important section of my system I had to roll the entire thing back to a backup so I'm hesitant.

Wrong system settings in repositories. Priorities. Google it.
But I warn you. Thick new software from other repositories is unstable.

[Jarmer]

I'm on Opensuse Tumbleweed, so I use the Packman repos for all things media related due to the dumb copyright codec stuff that plagues so many distros. They recently downgraded Mesa from 24.1.4 to 24.1.3 so now my entire system wants to do a downgrade whenever I run the update utility (which on a rolling distro is often!) - does anyone by chance know why this happened? I have been looking but can't find any info anywhere!! Maybe due to instability? Just not sure.

Last time I did a downgrade like this with an important section of my system I had to roll the entire thing back to a backup so I'm hesitant.

[user1]

My biggest gripe with gaming in linux currently is, the huge amount of time it takes to compile the shaders.

For instance after each CS2 update I have to wait like 5 minutes for the vulkan shader cache to compile, until the game starts. And most of the time it would be stuck on 99%, so the game does not even launch. This is on an AMD polaris card.

On Windows there is no such issue.

Does anyone know the cause or a solution?

Sounds like you have Steam shader pre-caching enabled. Go to Steam settings and disable shader pre-caching in the "downloads" tab.

About a year ago RADV implemented a Vulkan feature called GPL (graphics pipeline library), which pretty much eliminates the need of shader pre-caching in order to have stutter free gameplay. I already have pre-caching disabled for a few months and all my games are stutter free.

Of course games with very heavy shaders might still have some stutters, but on the other hand shader pre-caching didn't completely eliminate stutters in such games either.

[Nuc!eoN]

My biggest gripe with gaming in linux currently is, the huge amount of time it takes to compile the shaders.

For instance after each CS2 update I have to wait like 5 minutes for the vulkan shader cache to compile, until the game starts. And most of the time it would be stuck on 99%, so the game does not even launch. This is on an AMD polaris card.

On Windows there is no such issue.

Does anyone know the cause or a solution?

[user1]

Is it now defaulting to Valve's single file shader cache that's already available for a few years, or is it a completely new implementation?
Also, does anyone have a link to the relevant commit / merge request?

[Nille]

It was to speed up glReadPixel calls, I believe, which isn't exactly something most games are going to use.

WoW used it with OpenGL to render the minimap. And as far as i know there where a bunch of workarounds for ATIs buggy ReadPixel function in the fglrx driver. With the decline of OpenGL its less important but still a big thing.

[smitty3268]

This is version that comes with the magical 7 lines of code that 'massively improved performance', right? Tested it on Unigine Superposition and didn't see any improvement. Can anyone confirm?

It was to speed up glReadPixel calls, I believe, which isn't exactly something most games are going to use. I think stuff like screenshotting software probably uses it. And i think his blog post was about a video or something. Pretty unlikely Unigine is using it for anything.

[Lbibass]

This is version that comes with the magical 7 lines of code that 'massively improved performance', right? Tested it on Unigine Superposition and didn't see any improvement. Can anyone confirm?

That massive performance increase was basically for one game. Which he goes over in the blog post.