7 Days To Die Is Another Game Seeing A Big Bump From Mesa OpenGL Threading

For those that are fans of the 7 Days to Die open-world shooter / horror game, the performance on Linux is now as much as 30% higher as a result of Mesa GL threading.

With Mesa 20.0-devel (and presumably for back-porting too) is whitelisting mesa_glthread for the 7 Days to Die game on Linux.

This is the few years old functionality around better CPU multi-threading within Mesa where some games are as much as 60~76% faster thanks to punting some of the OpenGL driver work off to a separate CPU thread.

Besides having an XML whitelist option for marking executables that benefit from the Mesa OpenGL threading functionality, the mesa_glthread environment variable can also be used for manually enabling this functionality too. The feature isn't enabled by default since it doesn't help out all OpenGL applications/games.

AMD developer Marek Olšák marked the game for Mesa OpenGL threading while noting it helped the performance by about 30%.

7 Days To Die is a Unity powered game released in 2013.