Former Nouveau GSoC Developer Now Working For Valve On Open-Source AMD Driver

We have known of Valve wanting to improve AMDGPU DRM for VR Linux gaming and Valve wanting to contract Mesa developers to improve the open-source AMD driver. Now we know at least one of the faces who is hired by Valve to improve the open-source AMD driver.

Samuel Pitoiset, the developer that started contributing to Nouveau about three years ago by working on compute support during the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), has turned from green to red with being hired by Valve. Over the years working on Nouveau he's managed NVC0 compute code, a lot of performance counter work, AMD_Performance_Monitor support, other compute work, and OpenGL 4 extensions.

And yes, the big work covered this morning of OpenGL 4.3 for Maxwell/Pascal and a big Maxwell performance boost. But in announcing that work this morning, he announced he is stepping back from the Nouveau community to focus on Valve's AMD work. Samuel commented, "This is my last contribution for the Nouveau driver for a while because I have been hired by Valve to work on radeonsi. Do not expect such perf improvements with radeonsi because it already performs really well, unlike Nouveau. But with time and patience we can do better. :-)"

Congratulations to Samuel and it's very exciting to see what's possible in the Linux/open-source space particularly for graphics driver developers being in such demand going from starting with GSoC to contracting for Valve in just a few short years. Can't wait to see what magic Samuel can manage with the open-source RadeonSI code in 2017!