Freedreno Gallium3D Gets Hardware Binning For A5xx

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freedreno Gallium3D Gets Hardware Binning For A5xx

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver for open-source, reverse-engineered 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno graphics has another important performance feature...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Freedreno-A5xx-Hardware-Binning

[brauliobo]

Michael I'm missing more and more mobile graphics benchmarks. I'm wondering about the state of support of Android in PTS. Would be very nice to have benchmarks of mobile GPUs.

[liam]

Great to have this. This should improve power usage as well.
I'd love to know why this is called "hardware" binning since the driver is responsible for tile layout on the fast mem and finding an efficient way to do vertex culling, iirc.

[robclark]

Great to have this. This should improve power usage as well.
I'd love to know why this is called "hardware" binning since the driver is responsible for tile layout on the fast mem and finding an efficient way to do vertex culling, iirc.

basically it is a hw pre-pass to generate a visibility stream about which primitives are visible in which bin/tile so that in the main draw pass the hw can discard primitives that are not visible in a given tile. Either way, the driver is responsible for dividing the render target into tiles which fit into internal memory (GMEM), and I have been doing some experiments[1] to see if I can come up with a more optimal layout. (Seems to be worth an extra couple percent fps.. so not huge but still perhaps worthwhile.)

[1] https://github.com/freedreno/mesa/commits/tile-calc