Mesa Now 2~5x Faster For SPECViewPerf Following OpenGL Optimizations

Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has just merged one of his largest set of optimizations in recent times: 2~5x faster performance for SPECViewPerf.

SPECViewPerf is the common industry benchmark for measuring graphics performance for professional applications with benchmark viewsets from 3ds Max, CATIA, Maya, Solidworks, Siemens NX, and other programs. The performance when using Mesa drivers have been lagging but now thanks to common Mesa infrastructure improvements by Mesa, the performance is wildly improved.

With around three thousand lines worth of Mesa changes, the OpenGL uniform/state handling has been improved along with related enhancements.

The merge request was opened two months ago but only merged today. Marek noted, "This MR improves performance by about 2x and sometimes 5x for SPECviewperf, or something like that. All I can say is that if you want to be a happy SPECviewperf user, you need this."

This work will be found in Mesa 21.0 due out in March. It will be interesting to see how this translates for other workstation applications and if any other workloads end up benefiting from this extensive Mesa work by Marek.