Developer Mike Blumenkrantz, who is one of many under contract by Valve, has released another blog post highlighting another fun optimization from their ongoing Mesa driver work.
The post as usual is highly technical, so if you want to full info give it a read. The issue is with how Mesa was dealing with the Vulkan Queue system, and what they were doing originally seemed to be a bit of a problem where it was "splitting the batched submits into individual ones, each submit also allocates a struct to contain the submit info so that the drivers can use the same interface. So it’s increasing the kernel overhead by performing multiple submits and also increasing memory allocations" with Blumenkrantz mentioning multiple tests that "showcase some driver pain points".
The result is a pull request (not yet merged) that gives a performance improvement on RADV GFX11 (RDNA3) of 1000% in one case and 50% in another. An impressive win but it continues. On Lavapipe (a CPU-based Software Vulkan driver) it saw a 3000% improvement in one case and a 1000% improvement in another, Intel Arc (Intel DG2) one case saw a 5000% improvement and Turnip A740 had a 4000% improvement and a 3000% improvement for another point.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
I read his post, wish there would be some real life examples. 5000% sounds amazing but what is the impact on game X :)
Still nice work fixing that
Still nice work fixing that
4 Likes, Who?
This sounds great. I'm curious to know if this will have any effect on the Steam Deck specifically.
1 Likes, Who?
It's an optimisation that helps with all Mesa drivers not just radv.
Overall it should help reduce latency.
Imagine you want to send a 'command' to the GPU, and sending it to the GPU takes 5ms, sending 10 commands will take 50ms, with this modification sending the 10 commands in a batch will take just 5ms. Now, replace the milliseconds with nanoseconds. It's a lot of time saved, but, compared to the rest of the time taken to process the commands (GPU side) for a frame you may not see a noticeable performance increase. If the game issues a lot of commands (CPU side) in one frame then you could see a noticeable performance increase.
This improvement may benefit weaker CPUs, that could not brute force their way through the individual calls.
Overall it should help reduce latency.
Imagine you want to send a 'command' to the GPU, and sending it to the GPU takes 5ms, sending 10 commands will take 50ms, with this modification sending the 10 commands in a batch will take just 5ms. Now, replace the milliseconds with nanoseconds. It's a lot of time saved, but, compared to the rest of the time taken to process the commands (GPU side) for a frame you may not see a noticeable performance increase. If the game issues a lot of commands (CPU side) in one frame then you could see a noticeable performance increase.
This improvement may benefit weaker CPUs, that could not brute force their way through the individual calls.
6 Likes, Who?
I think these 5000% means for that particular stage, but how much it affects actual games is the interesting question. Still, such huge improvement for anything is a big win for Vulkan drivers.
0 Likes
Quoting: BumadarI read his post, wish there would be some real life examples. 5000% sounds amazing but what is the impact on game X :)
Yeah, maybe a 5000% improvement in specific behaviour of something that wasn't working correctly. Some little test operation that got 2 FPS now gets 10,000 while off screen rendering, or something.
0 Likes
redneckdrow Sep 25, 2023
Turnip?! I just got used to potato meaning under-powered; now they have to throw brands named for other roots and tubers in the mix? I really hate modern internet slang! 
It makes me feel like taking the A.P. English exams in my Junior/Senior years was a waste. No one seems to care about the language anymore, save academia.
I have to keep the Urban Dictionary bookmarked just to parse what some websites' posts mean!
It makes me feel like taking the A.P. English exams in my Junior/Senior years was a waste. No one seems to care about the language anymore, save academia.
I have to keep the Urban Dictionary bookmarked just to parse what some websites' posts mean!
0 Likes
Quoting: redneckdrowTurnip?! I just got used to potato meaning under-powered; now they have to throw brands named for other roots and tubers in the mix? I really hate modern internet slang!
This is no slang, Turnip is just the name of a Vulkan Driver inside mesa. Just search the web for "mesa Turnip". Same as RADV (AMD), ANV (Intel), Dozen (DX12), etc. Here it's used for Qualcom Adreno GPUs (mobile devices mostly). Look for the "tu" column on https://mesamatrix.net/
I'm not sure where the name comes from, but at least it's simple to remember and quite searchable.
A few more search hits for it:
https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/freedreno.html
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/tested-freedreno-turnip-mesa-vulkan-drivers-in-emulation-on-poco-f3.4401031/
I doubt you'd find some info regarding this on Urban Dictionary.
0 Likes
Vasya Sovari Sep 25, 2023
Quoting: redneckdrowTurnip?! I just got used to potato meaning under-powered; now they have to throw brands named for other roots and tubers in the mix? I really hate modern internet slang!
It makes me feel like taking the A.P. English exams in my Junior/Senior years was a waste. No one seems to care about the language anymore, save academia.
I have to keep the Urban Dictionary bookmarked just to parse what some websites' posts mean!
This is inherent to the nature of the English language. I'm a 45yo native speaker, and new terms arrive so rapidly I don't even bother *trying* to keep up. If a sentence makes no sense I simply assume it wasn't targeted at me, ignore it and move on.
0 Likes
Quoting: Vasya SovariQuoting: redneckdrowTurnip?! I just got used to potato meaning under-powered; now they have to throw brands named for other roots and tubers in the mix? I really hate modern internet slang!
It makes me feel like taking the A.P. English exams in my Junior/Senior years was a waste. No one seems to care about the language anymore, save academia.
I have to keep the Urban Dictionary bookmarked just to parse what some websites' posts mean!
This is inherent to the nature of the English language. I'm a 45yo native speaker, and new terms arrive so rapidly I don't even bother *trying* to keep up. If a sentence makes no sense I simply assume it wasn't targeted at me, ignore it and move on.
Every living language changes and evolves.
Specialist jargon can facilitate more efficient communication of ideas between people acquainted with the subject, so it's not a bad thing in general. Slang is more of a social phenomenon, and many of the common phrases and words we all use today were once what we'd have considered slang of one group/subculture or another.
This windmill isn't worth tilting at.
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: tuubiThis windmill isn't worth tilting at.Ahhhh, get off my lawn!
2 Likes, Who?
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