Mesa Flips On OpenGL Threading For Valheim To Deliver Better Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Flips On OpenGL Threading For Valheim To Deliver Better Performance

For those enjoying the Valheim, the new survival/sandbox game that has been an incredible success and sold more than four millions of copies so far while being a low-budget indie game, Mesa should be providing better performance when using its OpenGL renderer...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-21.1-Valheim-GL-Thread

[eydee]

20 years ago: We aren't adding game specific optimizations. It's lame. Everything should work according to standards.

Now: We're fglrx...

[skeevy420]

The problem is that not everything follows the open standards to the letter so you either have to compromise with per-game optimizations or potentially crappy running games.

[mitch074]

20 years ago: We aren't adding game specific optimizations. It's lame. Everything should work according to standards.

Now: We're fglrx...

That's both harsh and unwarranted. fglrx had several hard-coded rendering paths depending on app and many quirks. Mesa has one rendering path with run-time options that you can choose to enable or disable at will, and provides a list of what settings should be enabled for what application, with a default providing high compliance with OpenGL specifications.

[gnarlin]

Why can't multi threading be enabled globally for everything and then a blacklist for applications that can't handle multi-threading instead of the white list that's in use now? Are there so many games and applications that misbehave with multi-threading?

[pkunk]

Why can't multi threading be enabled globally for everything and then a blacklist for applications that can't handle multi-threading instead of the white list that's in use now? Are there so many games and applications that misbehave with multi-threading?

It will hurt performance for games/applications actually caring about it and implementing "OpenGL threading" themself.

[bridgman]

20 years ago: We aren't adding game specific optimizations. It's lame. Everything should work according to standards.

Now: We're fglrx...

In fairness this isn't a game-specific optimization, just application profiles adjusting a common set of runtime options.

Unrelated to that, maybe I'm just out of touch but the Valheim trailer looked mighty impressive in terms of the scope & complexity of the game.

[tildearrow]

20 years ago: We aren't adding game specific optimizations. It's lame. Everything should work according to standards.

Now: We're fglrx...

Apples vs. oranges

1. Game-specific optimizations (the proprietary driver way) in where the codepath is different per game

2. Game-specific settings (the Mesa way) which toggle codepaths

[carewolf]

Why can't multi threading be enabled globally for everything and then a blacklist for applications that can't handle multi-threading instead of the white list that's in use now? Are there so many games and applications that misbehave with multi-threading?

It is not the applications that have trouble, is it the drivers.

[tildearrow]

The age of automatic tuning of OpenGL/Vulkan apps using AI techniques hasn't started yet (i.e: to automatically determine which codepaths to toggle). The current focus of AI in graphics is on image-level optimizations: upscaling and sharpening.

Don't give the proprietary driver devs ideas....