AMD's Open-Source Mesa Driver Continues To Be Ruthlessly Optimized For Workstation Performance

One of the areas where AMD's long-standing "PRO" OpenGL driver has generally held an advantage over RadeonSI Gallium3D has been around workstation software but that has been changing.

Over the past year there have been AMD developers working on making major optimizations for SPECViewPerf workloads, lowering the driver overhead, and other improvements for workstation OpenGL software.

On top of all the work achieved over the past year, it looks like another batch of improvements will be landing shortly and that could put it at the brink of parity with AMD's Windows/Linux closed-source OpenGL driver.

In the community discussion stemming from the recent Zink benchmarks, well known AMD open-source Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák commented, "The current gap for Snx [Siemens NX] between pro drivers and Mesa is ~2% with my private branch."

He later added that he hopes to get those remaining patches reviewed and upstreamed into Mesa RadeonSI over the next month or so. Thus by the time of Mesa 21.3 at the end of the year it's possible RadeonSI will be very competitive to Radeon Software PRO for workstation use-cases while already on the gaming front the Mesa driver stack has long reigned supreme.