Tessellation Shaders Land For RadeonSI NIR Backend

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 5 January 2018 at 06:11 AM EST. 9 Comments
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The work led by Valve Linux driver developer Timothy Arceri on adding tessellation shader support to RadeonSI's NIR code-path has been merged to Mesa 17.4-dev Git.

RadeonSI Gallium3D has been working on a NIR back-end for eventually supporting SPIR-V ingestion as needed for OpenGL 4.6 compliance with code sharing with the RADV Vulkan code. Eventually though RadeonSI may eventually switch to using NIR completely as its intermediate representation. But before that can happen, the RadeonSI NIR support needs to get to parity with its existing OpenGL support when tied to TGSI IR.

One of the features limiting its OpenGL support with RadeonSI NIR so far was not supporting tessellation shaders. Last week Arceri posted initial RadeonSI NIR tessellation patches while last night those patches were merged to Git.

Following a number of patches, RadeonSI NIR tessellation support was enabled in time for what will become this quarter's Mesa 18.0 release. RadeonSI NIR isn't used by default but you can experiment with this back-end via the R600_DEBUG=nir environment variable.
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