Virglrenderer Sees Some New Micro-Optimizations

Virglrenderer that is part of the open-source Linux effort to provide accelerated OpenGL to guest virtual machines has been enjoying some new micro-optimizations.

Gert Wollny outlined how making use of Perfetto for run-time profiling of Virglrenderer they were able to gain new insight into areas of Virglrenderer to focus on for micro-optimizations.

Following these Virglrenderer micro-optimizations, Unigine Heaven benefited the most of the tested games/programs with a 6.2% improvement, taking it from 60.7 to 64.5 FPS. Other software like additional Unigine demos, the Xonotic open-source game, and other graphics tests were in the 1~3% range.

"A number of micro-optimizations were applied to virglrenderer that each taken on their own would probably not give a notable performance improvement, but all taken together show a increase in performance for most of the selected benchmarks. With these changes, perf no longer shows any performance hot-spots in the code that can easily be optimized," more details on this Virglrenderer optimization effort via this Collabora blog post.