AMD Moving Forward In Their RadeonSI Support For ARB_gl_spirv

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Moving Forward In Their RadeonSI Support For ARB_gl_spirv

AMD open-source developer Nicolai Hähnle has spent the past few months working on the ARB_gl_spirv extension as mandated by OpenGL 4.6. Some of the prep work for supporting that extension has landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Initial-GL-SPIRV-Bits-In-Git

[nhaehnle]

It should be noted that while I did some of the initial work, the credit for this recent development needs to go elsewhere, in particular to Eduardo.

[andrebrait]

With all this SPIR-V buzz I began reading more about it and as far as I understand it's an IR for OpenGL/Vulkan/OpenCL and it would allow developers to ship compiled OpenCL binaries instead of requiring those to be compiled on the target device. Am I right on this?

Also, is it viable to ship shaders as SPIR-V as well, saving one compilation step, and minimizing shader compile times and whatnot?