Marek submits patch series for threaded Gallium to Mesa, boosts performance in games

AMD employee and Mesa developer Marek Olšák is at it again, proposing a series of patches that would boost performance for AMD GPUs running the open drivers.

In this entry in the mailing list, Marek has pointed out that his proposed patches would thread certain calls made in the driver and the end result is a performance boost for most programs. He’s a little conservative to assessing the results but his own tests show on a R9 Fury the average performance boost is around the 10% mark. Perhaps more interestingly for normal desktop use, he found that there are also improvements with rendering GTK widgets and the X11 window system.

Here's his results from the games he tested:

QuoteAPPS: MORE IS BETTER
Alien Isolation: +16%
Bioshock Infinite: +13%
Borderlands 2: +12%
Civilization 5: +12%
Civilization 6: +10%
CS:GO: +8%
ET Legacy: +12%
Openarena: +27%
Talos Principle (high details, 1680x1050 internal resolution): +17%
glmark2: no change in the final score

This patch series not quite perfect and there may be some issues with some programs here and there and with some configurations. As is typical with Mesa development, the patch series is to be reviewed and commented upon by other contributors and, if appropriate, changes made before it is committed. Still, this is a really cool thing to see and, as someone who uses mesa-git regularly, I can’t wait to see it finalized so I can test it out.

I think it's worth repeating that this series is targeted for AMD GPUs running the RadeonSI drivers. The nomenclature for the various parts of Mesa/AMD drivers can be confusing for the uninitiated, but basically this patch is for the driver that covers all GPUs starting from the higher-end of the 7xxx series to every newer AMD graphics card released since. That said, from my admittedly limited layman's reading, I think that there's bits in this patch series that other drivers in the Mesa project could eventually use. That may be up to the other Mesa contributors and developers to implement on their own, however.

It’s a good time to be a Mesa user. I’m always amazed at how quickly improvements are made. If you haven’t seen it already – you may want to look at the brief overview of the recent Mesa release. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.