RadeonSI Fast Color Clears Should Now Be Even Faster

Prolific Radeon Mesa contributor Marek Olšák of AMD started off his Sunday by posting another set of RadeonSI driver patches.

These four patches for now are just on the mailing list but will presumably soon be part of Mesa 18.3-dev. One of the patches is worth noting in that compute shaders are now used for clear and copy buffers. Marek noted that fast color clears as a result should be much faster. If you happen to hit fast color clears on evicted buffers, he noted they should now be 200x faster on GFX8 hardware and older. GFX8 covers Polaris going back to Fiji and Tonga, so basically any GCN GPUs pre-Vega should be helped out with this latest patch work.

Fast color clears in RadeonSI have been present since 2014 and should help with multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance.

His final patch in this series provides an optimization for better tracking of context rolls around a Vega scissor bug workaround, so even the latest generation AMD GPUs are getting some of Marek's attention this weekend too.