AMD GPU Driver Engineer Marek Olšák Lands Mesa 25.0 Optimizations For Christmas

Longtime open-source Radeon graphics driver developer Marek Olšák that is well known for his Mesa improvements over the years and countless optimizations even before being employed by AMD has seen some exciting patches merged just in time for Christmas.

Whether it's just squeezing in outstanding work prior to the end of the calendar year or other Mesa optimizations we've seen from Marek prior years for Christmas, there are some nice patches that were merged today to Mesa 25.0-devel.

The month-old merge request merged today is to always lower IO in the GLSL linker and then unlowering IO to variables before passing to drivers. This is a common Mesa change and not AMD specific. Marek explained in that now merged code:

"This enables nir_opt_varyings and nir_opt_vectorize_io for all gallium drivers, which are our best IO optimizations in Mesa so far. It also fixes some of the more complex test failures for many drivers (usually having to do with variable indexing).

It will enable code removal and [restructuring] of all GLSL linker and st/mesa code that deals with IO."

A nice win for Mesa 25.0 in general.

Separately this merge request of AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver changes brings fixes, cleanups, optimizations, and more. Among those patches are also tuning the Stream-Out performance for upcoming GFX12 / RDNA4 GPUs, various RDNA4 fixes, and other adjustments.

Marek has also been tending to other open merge requests thas as of writing have yet to land such as the six month old merge request for vectorizing SMEM loads up to 512 bits with RadeonSI using the ACO compiler back-end. Exciting times with the open-source AMD Linux graphics stack.