Mesa 22.3 RadeonSI Enables OpenGL Threading By Default To Enhance Performance

Back in August I wrote about AMD developers looking at OpenGL threading by default for their RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. One month later that change has now landed for next quarter's Mesa 22.3 -- barring any issues coming up that would lead to it being reverted.

RadeonSI has long supported the "glthread" option for executing OpenGL calls on a separate CPU thread. This threaded OpenGL dispatch support has been of big help to CPU-bound games but has been opt-in on a per-game basis via the DriConf or via an environment variable override. RadeonSI with glthread yielded a ~30% boost for Minecraft and double digit games in other titles, among a wide assortment of games to have been white-listed with the DriConf entries over the past few years.

But after a recent round of fixes/improvements, the belief now is that glthread is "complete" and "performant" enough to be enabled by default for the AMD RadeonSI driver.

This commit today flipped on the RadeonSI glthread by default. Obviously it won't make a difference for games already whitelisted but has the potential of helping many other games out there that hadn't been tested by users or developers for seeing if they are helped by this OpenGL threading option.