It's Getting Close Whether The OpenGL On-Disk Shader Cache Will Happen For Mesa 17.0

[crymsonpheonix]

What about RadeonSI?

Like most things in mesa getting the shared bits implemented is the hardest part. Once a decent implementation of the core parts land (even if initially i965 is the only driver wired up) it will be significantly easier to get other drivers using the cache, since they just have to wire up support for the core using the shared API. I would lay money that within a month after it lands either SI or nouvaeu gets support for shader caching.

[nomadewolf]

After so long reading about Mesa 13, suddenly seeing Mesa 17 confuses me...

[LeJimster]

marek / AMD landed this in-memory-shader-cache for radeonSI a year ago with Mesa 11.2, see https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...er-Cache-Lands
AFAIK, this helps already when you reload a level. But not if you restart the whole game.
He also multithreaded this in July, but I don´t know if it landed in mesa: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...ly/122986.html

Marek also said somewhere that the on disk shader cache is not a priority, because it is mostly useful when the game engine compiles shaders during the game and not during a loading screen before the gameplay starts, which arguably does not affect many games. See discussion in the link above.

Yep, I understand the improvements, but I disagree with the priority on the shader cache. Many games are just not playable now that would greatly benefit from an on-disk cache. In fact I'd put it as the number one thing missing right now.

Rocket League, Unreal Tournament are unplayable from what I've seen so far. Luckily the latter is still in development.

[shmerl]

Shadwen takes a long time to load as well. But can't applications cache shaders on their own? It's not really a job that driver should do for them.

[tomtomme]

Thing is, there are pretty popular games that do on the fly shader compilation and it affects performance significantly.

Tell Marek which games. The discussion noted too few (Talos, L4D2, Borderlands, unreal-engine, bioshock), so he was not convinced. Or maybe he already works on it.

[shmerl]

What about radeonsi? And I hope it's using XDG base directory spec. Nvidia blob doesn't for example and clutters $HOME with its cache directory.

[Evil Penguin]

Thing is, there are pretty popular games that do on the fly shader compilation and it affects performance significantly.

[tomtomme]

I know some patches were put in place to lay the ground for a shader cache on radeonsi, but that was a couple of months ago. The only updates we've had are for intels sc.

marek / AMD landed this in-memory-shader-cache for radeonSI a year ago with Mesa 11.2, see https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...er-Cache-Lands
AFAIK, this helps already when you reload a level. But not if you restart the whole game.
He also multithreaded this in July, but I don´t know if it landed in mesa: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...ly/122986.html

Marek also said somewhere that the on disk shader cache is not a priority, because it is mostly useful when the game engine compiles shaders during the game and not during a loading screen before the gameplay starts, which arguably does not affect many games. See discussion in the link above.

[Azpegath]

RadeonSI and amdgpu.
Loading times for Outlast are horrible on Linux resulting in having to click away "app is not responding" notifications.

They are the same in this case, the shader on-disk cache is handled in the Mesa driver. amdgpu/radeon are kernel drivers, they are in a whole other layer.
The amdgpu driver uses the same radeonsi Mesa layer as the radeon driver.

ps: Sorry, saw that other had already described this :ds

[tomtomme]

Perhaps he meant RadeonSI and R600? Either way, it would be nice for both of them to have it.

thx. I tend to forget about r600. I edited my explanations accordingly. Its complicated, all this driver mess