Mesa OpenGL Threading Now Ready For Community Testing, Can Bring Big Wins

Marek Olšák's work on OpenGL multi-threading is now ready for more wide-scaling testing and will be enabled on a whitelist-basis for games capable of benefiting from this approach.

The Mesa OpenGL multi-threading is driver-agnostic but isn't being turned on unconditionally as it has the potential of hurting the performance for some games. Thus Marek is now looking at community testing to help create a white-list of games where this feature helps.

On a mid-range GPU with this mesa_glthread functionality enabled, Alien Isolation is faster by 60%, Border Lands 2 by 50%, BioShock Infinite by around 76%, and Civilization 6 by about 20%. But there's many more games out there so Marek is hoping for more community testing to reveal the areas where this feature should be turned on for a given executable via DRIRC.

More details via this mailing list post. I'll have some fresh mesa_glthread tests shortly.