A Slew Of ACO Optimizations For The Radeon Vulkan Driver Landed In Mesa 20.0

The Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end that is optionally used by the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has continued growing in popularity with Linux gamers and also has continued maturing a lot for Mesa 20.0 that is due out later this quarter.

On top of the work that has merged already for ACO since its original mainlining in Mesa 19.3, optimizations and fixes are aplenty for ACO with RADV come Mesa 20.0.

Merged yesterday were instruction combining improvements for ACO that can particularly benefit Navi/GFX10 but also older generations. With the combining work, the number of instructions used when compiling shaders for popular games dropped by about 2.4%.

Separately merged were patches that have been around for about two months on uniform boolean optimizations. This helps a very tiny bit in the slightly smaller code size.

This and other ACO work will make for fun Mesa 20.0 testing shortly. Mesa 20.0 should be hitting its release candidate / feature freeze around the end of January and ideally releasing as stable about one month later, pending any blocker bugs pushing back the release for any significant amount of time.