Valve's new "ACO" Mesa shader compiler for AMD GPUs now has vertex shader support

For our third bit of Valve news today, they also recently announced that their Mesa shader compiler "ACO" had a bit of an upgrade recently as well.

Quick Reminder: ACO is a new Mesa shader compiler for AMD hardware, announced by Valve earlier this month. It's aimed as a replacement for LLVM and its main two goals are best-possible code generation for game shaders, and fastest-possible compilation speed.

Announcing the recent update on Twitter, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais said:

ACO now has vertex shader support, which helps bring down the compile times even further. Support has been pushed to our testing packages, along with some VS-specific instructions: https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1640915206474070669/

Griffais included this image, to show just how much difference it makes against the original LLVM, then a previous version of ACO and the latest ACO with Vertex Shader support. The results really do speak for themselves in this case:

Valve said that while it's currently only targeting the RADV Vulkan driver, they do intend to look at supporting RadeonSI later as well.

It's truly incredible to see the effort Valve is constantly putting in to improve Linux gaming. With Steam Play, xrdesktop and this too things are ridiculously exciting right now for Linux enthusiasts.