Radeon OpenGL Linux Driver Massively Improves 3D Texturing Performance For Older GPUs

Prominent open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has merged a new tantalizing set of patches that boost the 3D texturing performance for those using RDNA1 GPUs and older.

A set of ten patches were merged today by Marek for next quarter's Mesa 24.2 release. These patches help improve the performance from aging GFX6 "Cape Verde, Pitcairn, Tahiti, Oland, Hainan" through GFX9 "Vega" as well as GFX10 "RDNA1" GPUs. Marek's merge request simply states:

- 3D texturing performance improved 1.6x on Vega10 (gfx9), and 2.5x on Tonga (gfx8, the code is shared with gfx6-7). Gfx6-7 with the amdgpu kernel driver should get a similar performance improvement as Tonga.

- DCC MSAA enabled for gfx10-10.3

A 1.6x 3D texturing performance optimization on Vega! And 2.5x faster 3D texturing on even older GPUs! Plus finally having delta color compression (DCC) on GFX10 (RDNA1) GPUs to also help the performance.

With one of the patches in the series on GFX9 it ends up improving the SPECViewPerf energy test by 60% on Vega 10.

Another one of the patches confirm the 2.5x performance increase is measured using SPECViewPerf's energy scene on Tonga.

Fascinating work as always by Marek and impressive to see these gains being made in 2024 benefiting hardware going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series still on the open-source Linux driver stack considering the support was already rather robust and competitive.