RadeonSI's Mesa Shader Cache Can Be A Big Help To Modern Linux Games

[dungeon]

Closed drivers have threaded GL enabled on particular apps via profiles, so i don't think this close will be so close always

Disk cache might show more or less interrupt effect in % on particular CPU let say... likely will show benhmark diff if game compile shaders during play and yeah issue would be even worse without for people with slower CPUs of course

It just improve low fps since it does not go down sometimes when compiling... thanks to better number of low, thus also average somewhat improve.

[dungeon]

I think I read timothy mention the current implementation isn't permanent atm if you: switch between 32 and 64bit apps; rebuilt mesa or llvm etc

I think that blobs do separate cache per binary, every different binary create/use different cache even if same game provide 32bit and 64bit binaries. They also tend to lose cache even on reinstallation of the exact same driver...

So what you said there is expected behavior with blob drivers also, if you change driver you lose cache also.

[AsuMagic]

there is no fps improvements from this feature. it is seen on benchmark only because benchmark is short and restarts game. if you don't restart game, you will see no fps improvements during play after first shader loads.
if you want to see fps improvements, you should pay attention to this:
22:51 mareko: threaded gallium has exceeded my expectations

IIRC shadow of mordor does compile shaders on the fly, so the shader cache should make it benefit a bit.

[boffo]

Mostly true but this brings us inline with the closed drivers, if framerates are reported as higher in the benchmarks we may see closer results with those drivers.

Good job!

[pal666]

Mostly true but this brings us inline with the closed drivers, if framerates are reported as higher in the benchmarks we may see closer results with those drivers.

don't get me wrong, i expect my driver to be polished and i appreciate your work. i just want it to be fast first

[pal666]

IIRC shadow of mordor does compile shaders on the fly, so the shader cache should make it benefit a bit.

many games do, but it happens only once per application run. so time for compilation per frame asymptotically approaches zero in the long run

[pal666]

With profile-sync-daemon showing the benefits of running your firefox profile in a ramdisk, my next thought is:

 tmpfs /home/ant/.cache/mesa tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0

in /etc/fstab

Since it doesn't matter about keeping the cache across reboots, right?

no, as already said. if you want your cache to be in memory, run
cat ~/.cache/mesa/*/*/*/* >/dev/null

[scorp]

Interesting results for Deus Ex in Ultra settings, I didn't expect such an improvement of FPS. In this test the count rose from 19 to 29. I compared this numbers with latest NVIDIA results and happily realized, that now RX480 performance is in between of 1050Ti and 1060 where it actually should be Meanwhile AMDGPU has very competitive position compared to NVIDIA closed source drivers. Unfortunately, there is still a huge gap if you compare the results to Windows 10 and DX11, but this is not a matter of drivers I think, but a sign of weak ports.
Meanwhile, if I compare the overall benefits, I'd clearly advise to use AMD for Linux. If you compare FPS per dollar, AMD wins hands up and regarding system maintenance open source drivers are just better. I have one system with NVIDIA and one with AMD here, both running ArchLinux. With NVIDIA I have issues upgrading the system from time to time, nothing really bad and what an experienced user couldn't solve, but for a beginner it would be really annoying. With AMD on the other side everything works always out of the box.

[xpris]

So it working on R600? Anyone testing it with r600?

[ua=42]

So it working on R600? Anyone testing it with r600?

It is half ready for R600. It currently caches the Intermediate step (parsing the shader) but doesn't cache the compiled binary.