Gallium Nine With NIR Is Now Running Most D3D9 Games "Flawlessly"

Towards the beginning of the month we reported on the Gallium Nine state tracker working on NIR support as an alternative to its original focus on the common TGSI intermediate representation to Gallium3D. That NIR-ified version of Gallium Nine is now working and beginning to run most Direct3D 9 games fine.

Plumbing NIR support into Gallium Nine is being done for newer Gallium3D drivers that focus on NIR support rather than the aging TGSI. In particular, NIR support is needed for the new Intel Iris Gallium3D driver (though still yet to be mainlined), possibilities like running Gallium Nine atop Zink to in turn map to Vulkan drivers, and working for other NIR drivers like VC4/V3D or Freedreno.

The NIR state just a few weeks ago was a definite "work in progress" but now the NIR support has already been worked into such shape that the W.I.P. tag has been dropped. Gallium Nine developer Timur Kristóf has announced, "I've polished the MR according to feedback, and also added some additional fixes. Also removed the WIP tag. With these changes, most nine games we tested can work flawlessly on radeonsi with NIR."

Hopefully this Gallium Nine NIR work gets squared away in time for Mesa 19.1. The RadeonSI NIR support itself has also been getting tuned up though still defaulting to the TGSI back-end unless hitting the new per-game whitelist functionality (currently just Civilization VI) or setting AMD_DEBUG=nir for enabling this functionality.