AMD R600 Gallium3D Optimizing Back-End Merged

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 30 April 2013 at 04:16 PM EDT. 28 Comments
AMD
Vadim Girlin's shader-optimizing back-end for the AMD R600 Gallium3D driver has been merged into mainline Mesa.

Going back a while now Vadim Girlin has been working on shader optimizations for the open-source AMD driver. This optimized back-end hasn't been a huge focus among other AMD Linux driver developers since they are already set in their ways of using the R600 LLVM back-end, which is needed for their OpenCL/GPGPU focus.

Vadim, meanwhile, has continued improving his R600g optimization back-end and now it's been merged into mainline Mesa as an experimental option.

Per this commit, the R600 Gallium3D optimizing back-end for AMD Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series hardware can be enabled via the R600_DEBUG=sb environment variable.

This new back-end was committed just hours ago and came in over the copurse of several Git commits. Benchmarks on Phoronix of the R600 "SB" improvements are forthcoming but until then checkout the 15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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