Features You Will Not Find In The Mesa 13.0 Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Features You Will Not Find In The Mesa 13.0 Release

While Mesa 13.0 is coming along for release next month with exciting features like OpenGL 4.5 for Intel, unofficial GL 4.4/4.5 for RadeonSI/NVC0, and the addition of the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, there is some functionality that sadly won't be found in this release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-13.0-Not-Features

[jhenke]

OpenGL 4.5 support in LLVMpipe is my favorite-but-not-soon-to-be-seen feature. Exactly for the point: If you do not have proper GPU support (or no real GPU like in a VM) it would be nice to have at least the highest feature level. It is also useful for debugging, as only then you can debug code for OpenGL 4.5. It does not have to actually do everything, it would be enough to fake the more demanding features (like already done with multi-sampling).

[gwelter]

I don't want to sound negative because there has been put in a tremendous amount of work in Mesa the past year, but I was hoping for the merging of the etnaviv support. The required libdrm support was merged ahead and has been available sinds 2.4.71. Let's hope it will make it in Mesa 13.1.

[pinguinpc]

Very good listing of lacking features

However personally stay very interested on:

OpenGL Multi-Threading - Some modern games require proper multi-threading in the OpenGL driver for good performance, such as Witcher 2.

Unfortunately there hasn't been too much work on better multi-threading of Mesa/Gallium3D drivers.

The only work that comes to mind was some earlier work done by Intel but nothing too fancy and haven't seen any work in the Gallium3D space.


On-Disk Shader Cache - There's been patches for an on-disk GLSL shader cache to speed up game loading times going back many months.

The work has been centered around the Intel i965 driver and unfortunately this shader cache hasn't yet landed in Mesa Git.

We also haven't seen any public shader cache work for RadeonSI or NVC0 yet. Some prep work landed in Mesa in September for the shader cache, but unfortunately it's not all buttoned up yet.

The shader cache will be a big win for game loading times on supported Mesa drivers.


AZDO / Driver Overhead - More work is still needed for making Mesa drivers support "Approaching Zero Driver Overhead" techniques.

Some extensions are supported but other extensions like ARB_indirect_parameters, ARB_bindless_texture, ARB_sparse_texture, and many other extensions are not yet supported by Mesa or only by a subset of the drivers.


OpenGL 2015 / 2016 Extensions - Related to the previous AZDO comment, there still are a ton of ARB/EXT extensions post-4.5 OpenGL that have yet to be implemented by Mesa drivers.

You can see all of the red via the bottom of MesaMatrix.net.

Not all of the extensions are necessarily useful but a good number of them are important.

There are also a number of OpenGL ES 3.1/3.2 extensions yet to be completed by the Radeon or Nouveau drivers.


GLSL Memory Allocation Rework / Faster Compilation - Marek has recently been working on using Jemalloc in Mesa and improving the GLSL compiler performance.

Unfortunately this work didn't land for Mesa 13.0 but Marek did mention on the mailing list he is looking at merging some of his GLSL compiler improvement patches into Git this weekend.

Another remaning issue stay in lack of drivers GUI, for make more affordable use for new users

[eydee]

OpenGL Multi-Threading -

I played Team Fortess 2 with default settings and the pc hanged in 2 minutes. Then I read this article and deselected multi core graphics and the game did not hang pc anymore. Using Padoka ppa mesa and amdgpu kernel 4.9-rc1 driver. Have others similar experience?

I'd try turning off multicore rendering in the graphics options inside the game, if the setting is still exposed for users. It's known to cause issues like that for some people, no matter what platform/drivers they're using. Doing it in Mesa may achieve the same thing, but a check mark in the game may be easier and more convenient to manage.

[stalkerg]

You forgot FP64 for r600 without native support.

[csett86]

Etnaviv in Gallium would have been great for the embedded people.

[imirkin]

Phoronix: Features You Will Not Find In The Mesa 13.0 Release

AZDO / Driver Overhead - More work is still needed for making Mesa drivers support "Approaching Zero Driver Overhead" techniques. Some extensions are supported but other extensions like ARB_indirect_parameters, ARB_bindless_texture, ARB_sparse_texture, and many other extensions are not yet supported by Mesa or only by a subset of the drivers.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...0-Not-Features

FTR, ARB_indirect_parameters has been supported by nvc0 for a while and has semi-recently been implemented by radeonsi as well.

[M@GOid]

OpenGL Multi-Threading -

I played Team Fortess 2 with default settings and the pc hanged in 2 minutes. Then I read this article and deselected multi core graphics and the game did not hang pc anymore. Using Padoka ppa mesa and amdgpu kernel 4.9-rc1 driver. Have others similar experience?

I'm having this problem with CS:GO for a long time now, first with the r9 290 and now with the RX 470. Messing with the graphic configs I discovered that Vsync was causing the hangs.

L4D2 is okay, only have problem with the sound system always reseting to 5.1 setup.

[pal666]

Some modern games require proper multi-threading in the OpenGL driver

i'd call it "some cpu-bound games are not smart enough to issue gl calls from separate thread"