Trying Out The New OpenGL Threaded Dispatch In Mesa 17.1

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trying Out The New OpenGL Threaded Dispatch In Mesa 17.1

At the beginning of today, OpenGL threaded dispatch landed in Mesa as work that's existed in patch form for years but was recently revived for Mesa Git due to the potential for significant performance gains in select scenarios...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-17.1-Thread-Dispatch-Test

[boxie]

That's rather interesting. maybe something is not working properly?

[mczak]

That's rather interesting. maybe something is not working properly?

I think this will always remain very much a rather hit-or-miss affair, to make effective use of multithreading you just need an api which is properly designed for it. GL maybe even was when considering how the hw actually worked 25 years ago, but not for todays needs. And trying to reap benefits "behind the api's back" is probably never going to work well for all cases.

[LeJimster]

Strange. Something is obviously not working correctly. I remember seeing old benchmarks on borderlands and their was a big performance boost.

Reading other people testing it they noticed no framerate gains but claim it was often a smoother experience wit it enabled.

Hopefully we can see more testing and work done to figure out why its seemingly not giving the performance boost expected.

[computerquip]

I don't see a Borderlands 2 benchmark here.

[brandonp]

I'm producing the exact opposite results of Micheal. Bioshock and Borderlands 2 see gigantic performance increases. When I run Bioshock without mesa_glthread, it can barely maintain 50-60fps. When I enable it, I get 100+fps.

I'd do a benchmark, but I need to go to work in the morning.

i7-2600
16GB DDR3 Ram
RX480
2TB HDD

I'm running ArchLinux with the latest updates and mesa-git:

lib32-mesa-git 17.1.0_devel.89956.124ec417f9-1
lib32-mesa-libgl-git 17.1.0_devel.89956.124ec417f9-1
mesa-git 17.1.0_devel.89956.124ec417f9-1
mesa-libgl-git 17.1.0_devel.89956.124ec417f9-1
lib32-llvm-libs-svn 5.0.0svn_r297958-1
lib32-llvm-svn 5.0.0svn_r297958-1
llvm-libs-svn 5.0.0svn_r297960-1
llvm-svn 5.0.0svn_r297960-1

I wonder if it's Micheal's LLVM version.

Edit: I also have the same performance with Borderlands 2. Without mesa_glthread it runs at 40-60fps, but with it runs at 100+fps.

[smitty3268]

I wonder if it's Micheal's LLVM version.

Nah, it's probably the way the phoronix test suite extracts environment variables in the Steam game tests. Wouldn't be the first time it was screwing up tests - see the way it kept erroring out when Michael was trying to test the Talos Principle on radv, for example. He kept saying the driver was failing but it was an issue with his testing setup.

[dungeon]

Someone on irc mentioned glthread on Borderlands 2 actually decrease performance using AMD Phenom x6.

Might be AMD topology diff hit something again, since Michael is on Ryzen

Total wild guess of course

But OK people reported improvments on Civ 5, Borderlands 2 / Pre Sequel, Bioshock... all 32bit apps, hmm... again wild guess what would be common

[LeJimster]

I don't see a Borderlands 2 benchmark here.

Oops, yes. I misread BioShock for borderlands. Still something not right as Brandon pointed out hes seeing a performance boost even on BioShock. I should really test myself, but my Linux install is barebones right now.

[LeJimster]

I'm producing the exact opposite results of Micheal. Bioshock and Borderlands 2 see gigantic performance increases. When I run Bioshock without mesa_glthread, it can barely maintain 50-60fps. When I enable it, I get 100+fps.
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Edit: I also have the same performance with Borderlands 2. Without mesa_glthread it runs at 40-60fps, but with it runs at 100+fps.

Thats impressive and closer to the results I had read about that was possible.