Mesa Picks Up Faster Support For S3TC Decoding Using LLVM

In the event you need to deal with software S3TC decoding rather than on the GPU in cases of hardware limitations or running within a VM, Mesa this week picked up a faster implementation.

Roland Scheidegger of VMware landed a patch into Mesa 19.0 that makes use of the LLVM JIT code for decoding S3TC.

The longtime Mesa developer reported, "This is (much) faster than using the util fallback." However, no hard numbers were supplied for just how much faster this LLVM JIT-based S3TC decoding is compared to the previous implementation.

This won't be relevant to most, but still love seeing patches like this for furthering along Mesa particularly in the performance department.