Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned on Twitter, about a new Mesa shader compiler for AMD graphics named "ACO" and they're calling for testers.
In the longer post on Steam, it goes over a brief history about Valve sponsoring work done by open-source graphics driver engineers, with it all being "very successful". The team has grown and they decided to go in a different direction with their work.
To paraphrase and keep it short and to the point, currently the OpenGL and Vulkan AMD drivers use a shader compiler that's part of the LLVM project. It's a huge project, it's not focused on gaming and it can cause issues. So, they started working on "ACO" with a focus on good results for shader generation in games and compile speed.
It's not yet finished, but the results are impressive as shown:
That is quite an impressive decrease in compile time! They expect to be able to improved that further eventually too, as it's currently only handling "pixel and compute shader stages". Valve also included some gaming results as well. Not quite as impressive when compared to the above perhaps, but every single bit of performance they can squeeze in is great:
With more detailed performance testing info available here. Now that it's looking pretty good, being stable in many games and seeing a reduction of stuttering they're looking for wider testing and feedback. Packages for Arch Linux should be ready later today, with Valve looking into a PPA for Ubuntu too. Interested in testing? See this forum post on Steam.
You can see the full post about it on Steam and more details on the Mesa-dev mailing list entry here. The code can also be viewed on GitHub.
This comes only recently after Valve released a statement about remaining "committed to supporting Linux as a gaming platform" as well as funding work on KWin. Really great to see all this!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: gradyvuckovicI'm loving their commitment more than anything. Most companies would have given up by now.
It probably helps, that Valve is a private company, so they can work on long term investments. Public ones are pressured by external investors to rip something off the market quick, and not to care about long term progress.
Last edited by Shmerl on 4 July 2019 at 1:05 am UTC
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Quoting: MohandevirNext build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).Don't pass off the ASUS cards. Mine were always good.
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Quoting: gradyvuckovicThis is fantastic! This is really just cutting straight to the heart of gaming issues on Linux, tackling the real hard problems like improving minimal frame rates and eliminating stutter. This will have such a positive impact on gaming performance under Linux. Of course, it's just for AMD GPUs. NVIDIA, getting the hint yet? Open source your drivers if you want some of the open source love!
I can agree that it's good to involve the community and prefer things to be open source but in this particular instance would Nvidia really benefit from implementing the idea behind this mesa shader branch? Valve got these good results because they had been using LLVM as their compiler and, like their post says since it's a general purpose compiler and overall affected by commits from people with other use cases, it didn't make sense to keep using it. But Nvidia's proprietary driver very likely doesn't incorporate LLVM and has probably had a gaming specialized shader compiler from the start.
I get the feeling this is an instance of Valve closing a gap between the open source AMD drivers and Nvidia's proprietary drivers that has existed from the start and not them using some novel new method that surpasses Nividia's implementation.
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Quoting: MadeanaccounttocommentBut Nvidia's proprietary driver very likely doesn't incorporate LLVM and has probably had a gaming specialized shader compiler from the start.
Nvidia's compiler is using llvm if I remember correctly. At least in some cases.
Their llvm backend: https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/tree/master/lib/Target/NVPTX
Not sure if their new blob Vulkan compiler is using it though.
UPDATE:
Related: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-396-nvvm
See also: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/nvvm-ir-spec/index.html
QuoteNVVM IR is a compiler IR (internal representation) based on the LLVM IR. The NVVM IR is designed to represent GPU compute kernels (for example, CUDA kernels). High-level language front-ends, like the CUDA C compiler front-end, can generate NVVM IR. The NVVM compiler (which is based on LLVM) generates PTX code from NVVM IR.
So, likely they do use llvm to translate PTX into machine code.
Last edited by Shmerl on 4 July 2019 at 4:52 am UTC
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Quoting: MadeanaccounttocommentQuoting: gradyvuckovicThis is fantastic! This is really just cutting straight to the heart of gaming issues on Linux, tackling the real hard problems like improving minimal frame rates and eliminating stutter. This will have such a positive impact on gaming performance under Linux. Of course, it's just for AMD GPUs. NVIDIA, getting the hint yet? Open source your drivers if you want some of the open source love!
I can agree that it's good to involve the community and prefer things to be open source but in this particular instance would Nvidia really benefit from implementing the idea behind this mesa shader branch? Valve got these good results because they had been using LLVM as their compiler and, like their post says since it's a general purpose compiler and overall affected by commits from people with other use cases, it didn't make sense to keep using it. But Nvidia's proprietary driver very likely doesn't incorporate LLVM and has probably had a gaming specialized shader compiler from the start.
I get the feeling this is an instance of Valve closing a gap between the open source AMD drivers and Nvidia's proprietary drivers that has existed from the start and not them using some novel new method that surpasses Nividia's implementation.
You're probably correct on all those points. But gradyvuckovic's remark was more about Nvidia realizing that a lot of good things can come out an open-source ecosystem.
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Quoting: GrabbyYou're probably correct on all those points. But gradyvuckovic's remark was more about Nvidia realizing that a lot of good things can come out an open-source ecosystem.
Nvidia doesn't care. They are like Oracle in this sense. They deal with open source very reluctantly, because they totally don't get the point of it.
Last edited by Shmerl on 4 July 2019 at 4:54 am UTC
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Quoting: ShmerlI think what Oracle gets is that, whatever the point of open source is, it probably isn't getting Larry Ellison an even longer yacht, so they are deeply suspicious.Quoting: GrabbyYou're probably correct on all those points. But gradyvuckovic's remark was more about Nvidia realizing that a lot of good things can come out an open-source ecosystem.
Nvidia doesn't care. They are like Oracle in this sense. They deal with open source very reluctantly, because they totally don't get the point of it.
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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI think what Oracle gets is that, whatever the point of open source is, it probably isn't getting Larry Ellison an even longer yacht, so they are deeply suspicious.
Heh, it reminds me this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m01s (starts at 33:01).
Last edited by Shmerl on 4 July 2019 at 8:21 am UTC
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Quoting: MadeanaccounttocommentBut Nvidia's proprietary driver very likely doesn't incorporate LLVM and has probably had a gaming specialized shader compiler from the start.It actually does, but for a different purpose. AFAIK they use LLVM for the same purpose that Mesa has NIR for, while the backend that targets their various GPU ISAs lives entirely inside the driver (so it would be SPIR-V -> LLVM -> (some IR) -> binary). AMD has a GCN backend living in LLVM, so for them it's SPIR-V -> NIR -> LLVM -> binary.
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Quoting: DaiKaiser93Well, I bought an MSI Armor RX580 8G a few months back, and I actually avoid playing anything too GPU-heavy because of the hellish noise it makes, so I wouldn't bet on it. There's also an unhealthy, intermittent rattle coming from the bearings already. This is probably the first and the last MSI product I'll ever buy.Quoting: MohandevirThing is, when you buy a GPU, you don't buy it thinking it will break in the next 6 months. This one had really cheap fans that had bearing noise problems. None of my GTX650 (ASUS), GTX750 ti (Gigabyte) and GTX960 (Gigabyte) had these problems and I never paid for premium models. There's a minimum quality that must be respected. Not going to buy any GPU from MSI ever again.
I don't believe is something with MSI as a whole, I'm running a MSI RX580 Gaming X for 2 years now and haven't had any problems with it.
Maybe it was a bad unit?
Weird thing is, I couldn't find a single review that had bad things to say about the heatsink back when I bought it. Now there seems to be a new version of the card/heatsink though, so maybe they made it better. Doesn't help me or Mohandevir or course.
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