RadeonSI Got Another Optimization After The 13.0 Branching

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Got Another Optimization After The 13.0 Branching

A short time after Mesa 13.0 was branched in Git yesterday, well known AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák was landing new work in master...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RadeonSI-First-Post-13-Opt

[Adarion]

While this is a highly welcome work, it is still sad that GPU driver devs have to work around design flaws of game developers / porters. (And a wrapper isn't really a port.) Anyway, if this help getting Witcher to "fly" (or at least run instead of walk or sneak) I'll be happy. I still got Witcher 1 and 2 as DVDs, both also on GOG and Witcher 3 also on GOG (preorder), though I didn't even play it yet. Butch the first parts were fairly good games, I liked the atmosphere and interactions of pt. 2 a little better (and no bald elves -> wtf!) but the controls were... well, less nice than pt. 1.

Anyway, cheers to the developers or the driver stack.

[pal666]

While this is a highly welcome work, it is still sad that GPU driver devs have to work around design flaws of game developers / porters.

it is like compiler devs should develop optimizations instead of everyone writing in hand-optimized assembly

[Sethox]

Well to be fair, this highlights how great the Mesa Project really is.

[marek]

Sadly, Witcher 2 needs multithreaded OpenGL to perform well.

[geearf]

Batman Arkham Origin always crashed my computer, so I'm happy to see progress there, on top of the rest.
I played The Witcher 2 without any major issue I believe.

[log0]

it is like compiler devs should develop optimizations instead of everyone writing in hand-optimized assembly

More like porters doing really stupid things (probably using some half assed shader conversion tools) that compiler devs have to write optimizations for.

[mazumoto]

Sadly, Witcher 2 needs multithreaded OpenGL to perform well.

Is there any incentive to get multithreaded GL working ? I assume it's quite a lot of work to get that right ?

[rosco]

this should provide much help to DirectX 9 eON game ports by Virtual Programming like Witcher 2

I guess saint row: the third should also benefit from the patch. As it is, the game is so slow that it's unplayable on my machine (HD7970)

[eydee]

While this is a highly welcome work, it is still sad that GPU driver devs have to work around design flaws of game developers / porters.

VP develops for nvidia blobs. Unfortunately while they provide good performance, they tend to do strange, out of spec stuff sometimes. Then the applications running on other drivers might miss these "features" and do use fallback code paths. Unfortunately back in the days when Witcher 2 was ported, Mesa wasn't able to run it yet, so there's little to no optimizations for it in the code. Pretty much no one can be blamed in this situation.