Mesa OpenGL Threading Now Ready For Community Testing, Can Bring Big Wins

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa OpenGL Threading Now Ready For Community Testing, Can Bring Big Wins

Marek Olšák's work on OpenGL multi-threading is now ready for more wide-scaling testing and will be enabled on a whitelist-basis for games capable of benefiting from this approach...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-GL-Thread-Community-Tests

[M@GOid]

He can put American Truck Simulator, Eutro Truck Simulator 2 and The Witcher 2 on that on that whitelist.

Edit: Ok, so I read the email where Marek talks about the list, so I will try to provide the names of the executables of the games I mentioned above. But just to be clear: Ubuntu did not provide a ~.drirc file by default on my home, so I can create it there and it will be utilized or I need to put it somewhere?

[gnarlin]

Wouldn't it be better to enable it globally and then blacklist games that had a performance regression?
That way there would be more testing and a better chance of finding common cause for the regressions?

[M@yeulC]

He can put American Truck Simulator, Eutro Truck Simulator 2 and The Witcher 2 on that on that whitelist.

He needs the executable names, though. And I am not sure TW2 still needs it. Unfortunately, I just uninstalled most of my games, so I can only give the one for TW2: "witcher2".

I might try it one of these days... Just need to install mesa git. By the way, is there anything special to do to setup a mesa development environment? (Including a fast compile-test cycle). Mesa, not kernel. I would like to see if I could get the compute shaders to work on R600 - 6870 (they don't seem to).

[kparal]

Is Mesa 17.1.4 + LLVM 4.0.0 (default Fedora 26 install) sufficient to test this properly? I know glthread makes a difference (I tested it with Bioshock Infinite), but I don't know whether I'm not missing some important commits currently available only in master.

Also, wouldn't it be easier to create a wiki for this? So that tens of people don't duplicate the effort and test the same games over and over, without knowing it?

[marek]

He can put American Truck Simulator, Eutro Truck Simulator 2 and The Witcher 2 on that on that whitelist.

Edit: Ok, so I headed the email where Marek talks about the list, so I will try to provide the names of the executables of the games I mentioned above. But just to be clear: Ubuntu did not provide a ~.drirc file by default on my home, so I can create it there and it will be utilized or I need to put it somewhere?

~/.drirc should not be used and should not be created, because it overrides default Mesa settings. If you have it, delete it.

I have drirc here: /usr/etc/drirc
It can also be here: /etc/drirc

[shmerl]

The Witcher 2 doesn't benefit much from it really. I tested it and didn't notice any significant difference.

The Witcher 3 in Wine on the other hand seems to benefit from it somewhat.

[marek]

Wouldn't it be better to enable it globally and then blacklist games that had a performance regression?
That way there would be more testing and a better chance of finding common cause for the regressions?

That's unlikely to happen without a strong corporate backing. Currently, we don't have time to bisect the performance regressions we already know of. What do you think would happen with glthread.

[marek]

Is Mesa 17.1.4 + LLVM 4.0.0 (default Fedora 26 install) sufficient to test this properly? I know glthread makes a difference (I tested it with Bioshock Infinite), but I don't know whether I'm not missing some important commits currently available only in master.

Also, wouldn't it be easier to create a wiki for this? So that tens of people don't duplicate the effort and test the same games over and over, without knowing it?

You need Mesa master. Older glthread performs badly. I'm all for a wiki if somebody maintains it.

[marek]

I might try it one of these days... Just need to install mesa git. By the way, is there anything special to do to setup a mesa development environment? (Including a fast compile-test cycle). Mesa, not kernel. I would like to see if I could get the compute shaders to work on R600 - 6870 (they don't seem to).

No. Just build Mesa and you can create symlinks in /usr/lib... pointing to your built .so files in your Mesa tree. Then just "make" and you don't have to install.