RadeonSI NIR Support Is Getting Squared Away, A Call For More Game Testing

Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri provided a status update today on the RadeonSI NIR back-end that is needed as part of the SPIR-V ingestion upbringing and that this Radeon GCN OpenGL driver may switch to using NIR by default in the future.

Arceri shared that when it comes to Piglit test cases, they are starting to get in good shape. There still is about 61 regressions but he has been digging into those and in some cases is just due to some functionality not yet being implemented.

Besides some test case failures, there are also some missing optimizations still, not yet any bindless texture support, better NIR shader cache handling, and more.

Timothy is looking for more real-world game testing to begin by those wanting to try out the NIR back-end. Of course, ideally being on Mesa Git for seeing the current state of the NIR code. Activating the RadeonSI NIR back-end can be done with the R600_DEBUG=nir environment variable.

It looks like I'll be running some RadeonSI NIR fresh benchmarks today now... Those wanting to see the detailed report on the state of RadeonSI NIR, swing by the Mesa-dev.