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Mesa is progressing nicely as usual and I've been keeping an eye on the mailing list for anything interesting. It seems Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Tomb Raider have both seen some more performance tuning.

Note: All of these are now in Mesa-git.

Samuel Pitoiset from Valve has sent in a small patch that should boost performance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided on AMD by a small amount. From the message on the public mailing list:
Quotewinsys/amdgpu: do not iterate twice when adding fence dependencies

The perf difference is very small, 3.25->2.84% in amdgpu_cs_flush() in the DXMD benchmark.


For the i965 (Intel) driver, both Tomb Raider and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will have a regression fix from Timothy Arceri (see here):
QuotePreviously the constant array would not get copy propagated until the backend did its GLSL IR opt loop. I plan on removing that from i965 shortly which caused huge regressions in Deus-ex and Tomb Raider which have large constant arrays. Moving lowering before the opt loop in the GLSL linker fixes this and unexpectedly improves some compute shaders also.


Even before that, Kenneth Graunke sent in a patch to improve both Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Tomb Raider even further:
QuoteHelps Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The one shader with hurt spills/fills is from Tomb Raider at Ultra settings, but that same shader has a -39.55% reduction in instructions and -14.09% reduction in cycle counts, so it seems like a win there as well.
That one seems to affect both Intel and AMD.

On top of that, Kenneth Graunke along with Matt Turner put in another patch to cut "one shader's estimated cycles by -98.39%!", this one is for i965 (Intel):
QuoteA number of "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided" shaders use image atomics, but don't use the return value. Several of these were hitting WAW stalls for nearly 14,000 (poorly estimated) cycles a pop. Making dead code elimination null out the destination avoids this issue.

This patch cuts one shader's estimated cycles by -98.39%! Removing the message response should also help with data cluster bandwidth.


All really great to see and it looks like the Mesa release after Mesa 17 (the next stable version) is looking tasty already. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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9 comments

stankalovich Jan 30, 2017
Wow these updates with the on disk shader cache make 17.1 look like the release that will make AAA titles run decently.Hopefully they can squeeze AMD OpenGL 4.5 into it as well.
Shmerl Jan 30, 2017
Quoting: stankalovichWow these updates with the on disk shader cache make 17.1 look like the release that will make AAA titles run decently.Hopefully they can squeeze AMD OpenGL 4.5 into it as well.

It is already in 17.0.
Beamboom Jan 30, 2017
It saddens me to read that the sales of Deus Ex:MD was so low that the future of the franchise is questioned - at least it's on hold for now.

Great review scores (holds a rock solid meta), great game prior to this one... What's wrong with gamers to miss this gem?

(obviously this is not something I blame Linux gamers in particular for - but gamers in general. Just to state the obvious)
jasondaigo Jan 30, 2017
Quoting: BeamboomIt saddens me to read that the sales of Deus Ex:MD was so low that the future of the franchise is questioned - at least it's on hold for now.

Great review scores (holds a rock solid meta), great game prior to this one... What's wrong with gamers to miss this gem?

(obviously this is not something I blame Linux gamers in particular for - but gamers in general. Just to state the obvious)

i returned the game because of the poor performance though. (960)
gurv Jan 30, 2017
Yeah poor performance seems the obvious reason why DE:MD did poorly (at least on PC, don't know about consoles).
Even if the game is really great, it has to run decently on the average gamer's hardware...
TheRiddick Jan 31, 2017
I wonder if they will need to keep applying these improvements to these sort of games each release or if they will automatically apply to other games that use the same rendering features?
cRaZy-bisCuiT Jan 31, 2017
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: TheRiddickI wonder if they will need to keep applying these improvements to these sort of games each release or if they will automatically apply to other games that use the same rendering features?
The fixes do not check which game is running.
Which could also cause regressions for other games.


For example I do have bad performance with Grid: Autosport on any kernel > 4.8! I still have to find out if it's related to the Kernel, Mesa, LLVM or the game itself.
giamic Feb 3, 2017
Deus Ex: MD is on sale now on Steam, and I thought of picking it up. I run Ubuntu with a decent CPU (i5-6500) and a rx470 4GB, do you think that the game will run smoothly or should I wait for more mature drivers?

EDIT: I have installed mesa version 17.1.0-devel from padoka ppa.


Last edited by giamic on 3 February 2017 at 10:50 am UTC
Boldos Jun 10, 2017
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Oh, my...
...how much I would like to see Deus Ex using Vulkan!
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