Initial Work Towards ARB_bindless_texture Support Lands In Mesa

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 7 May 2017 at 07:45 AM EDT. Add A Comment
MESA
The initial work towards ARB_bindless_texture support for Mesa has been merged to master.

Samuel Pitoiset, working for Valve on improving the open-source AMD graphics driver stack, has merged the initial GLSL patches for stepping towards bindless textures within Mesa. ARB_bindless_texture isn't all good to go yet, but it's being worked on so hopefully by Mesa 17.2 we will see it completed.

Only the GLSL bits have been merged with the RadeonSI driver bits not yet landing or reviewed yet. Once landed, ARB_bindless_texture has the ability to allow for greater OpenGL gaming performance for those making use of this extension.

From the registry:
This extension allows OpenGL applications to access texture objects in shaders without first binding each texture to one of a limited number of texture image units. Using this extension, an application can query a 64-bit unsigned integer texture handle for each texture that it wants to access and then use that handle directly in GLSL or assembly-based shaders. The ability to access textures without having to bind and/or re-bind them is similar to the capability provided by the NV_shader_buffer_load extension that allows shaders to access buffer objects without binding them. In both cases, these extensions significantly reduce the amount of API and internal GL driver overhead needed to manage resource bindings.

Along other performance lines, Timothy Arceri who is also working for Valve on the Radeon driver stack has landed more of his KHR_no_error support into Mesa Git this weekend as well.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week