More OpenGL Threading Improvements Land For Mesa 21.1

Even in 2021 longtime open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák isn't done optimizing OpenGL for delivering the best possible performance with the Radeon graphics driver. Marek's latest work includes more OpenGL threading enhancements and other work seemingly targeted at SPECViewPerf workloads.

Marek has spent the past several weeks working to remove the last OpenGL threading synchronization stalls that happen with SPECViewPerf 13. As part of this latest pull request he added support to glthread for executing display lists asynchronously. Plus there are some other OpenGL code improvements too.

That work was all mainlined today in Mesa 21.1-devel as part of this merge request.

This follows a 2~5x improvement for SPECViewPerf with the RadeonSI driver that came together at the end of last year. AMD developer Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer also landed some Mesa improvements in the past month where for some scenarios the performance is up by a factor of 1.2~2.0x.

Given all this recent work and a focus on SPECViewperf, it looks like either there is a big AMD customer already making use of RadeonSI or planning to do so in production for such workstation use-cases. Great seeing more interest from such customers in the open-source Mesa driver compared to their long-standing proprietary OpenGL component they continue to maintain on Linux but with seemingly diminishing returns.