Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is about to get ~70% better performance with RadeonSI

Marek sent in a patch for RadeonSI that will look to increase performance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [Steam, Feral Store] by around 70%.

That's incredible, seriously, that's an insanely large improvement for such a heavy game to get. Perhaps once this lands in a stable Mesa version, if it's good enough Feral might be able to officially support the game on AMD.

Marek said:

MarekHi,

These patches optimize our SDMA usage and implement buffer clearing.
They also turn SDMA IBs into de-facto preambles of GFX IB, because any
clear that is also the first buffer use is pushed

It improves DeusEx:MD performance by 70% and the slow ClearBuffer
implementation was the main problem. Using SDMA instead of slow CP DMA
restored performance, though we might also consider using a compute
shader instead of SDMA, because the compute shader can always be
asynchronous to graphics in this case (SDMA isn't asynchronous due
to the IB dependency).

Marek

Source

Sounds like he knows a better way to do it too, so it could improve further in future using a compute shader.

Marek is the same developer who has done multiple other performance improvements in the past, so it's pleasing to see they are still at it.

A pretty nice way to start 2017! I'm excited to think how far Mesa will go this year.

I imagine 2017 will be full of patches like this as Mesa is likely full of performance issues that can be fixed up. The Mesa developers pushed through towards OpenGL 4.5 quite quickly, so there's probably a lot of room for improvement. Having heavy games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on Linux provides good performance test cases. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.