Mesa Driver Improvement Will Yield Quicker Startup For Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

AMD Linux graphics driver engineer Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer has made an improvement to Mesa's common code that should yield much faster start-up times for Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Some users have found CS:GO start-up times to be painfully long and while working through another Radeon Mesa issue, the AMD engineer found it taking 150 seconds for CS:GO to start... But with this now-merged patch series, the 150 second start time is cut down to just 10 seconds.

While the initial belief was that shader compilation was slow, the optimization to Mesa ended up being faster glTextImage(GL_DEPTH_STENCIL) handling. With avoiding reading back textures from vRAM, a simplification in the _mesa_texstore code, and dropping a 2013 era fallback around GL_DEPTH_STENCIL handling, the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive start-up time is now much faster.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Linux

This merge request landed in Mesa 22.3-devel a few minutes ago as what will be the Q4 stable Mesa3D update. One of the three patches is also queued for back-porting to Mesa stable as partial relief.