RadeonSI Experimenting With Compute-Based Culling For Navi/GFX10

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has been experimenting with compute-based culling for GFX10/Navi hardware.

Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has merged experimental support for compute-based culling. Marek simply noted, "This is an experimental feature that might be used in the future."

This compute-based culling would be used in place of Navi's Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) based culling.

We have seen some NGG code within the open-source AMD Vulkan/OpenGL drivers worked around at times so it's possible this compute-based culling is being worked on for addressing potentially buggy behavior or potentially better performance, but we'll have to wait and see where this experimental work leads.

The code can be dug through in Mesa 20.1-devel on Git master or this merge request honored on Friday evening.