Mesa 19.1 Lands Gallium Nine Support For NIR, Opens Up Intel Iris Support

The Gallium Nine TTN support for "TGSI to NIR" to allow this Direct3D 9 state tracker to use the NIR intermediate representation as an alternative to Gallium's default TGSI representation has been merged to Git for Mesa 19.1.

Gallium Nine as a reminder allows Direct3D 9 support for Gallium3D drivers to allow for faster performance with Wine-based Windows applications/games running on Linux via Wine, compared to the more traditional Direct3D-to-OpenGL translation approaches for D3D9 support. Gallium Nine has long been tooled for TGSI, which RadeonSI and others started off with, but more/newer drivers are focusing on the NIR representation. NIR is also experimentally supported at this time by RadeonSI and notably is the default IR used by Intel's new Iris Gallium3D driver.

By supporting NIR with Gallium Nine, it opens the door for this state tracker to work with the Iris driver plus also with the Zink implementation for running on Vulkan drivers.

Over the past few weeks the Gallium Nine NIR support has matured and now working out fairly well. On Tuesday the code was merged to Mesa 19.1-devel.

The TTN (TGSI To NIR) code is now merged in Mesa Git.