Recently, the ACO shader compiler has received improvements in order to greatly reduce the number of memory operations used by the software, which should improve the performance of games and other 3D applications.
ACO is a shader compiler developed by Valve, with the aim of replacing the “LLVM Shader Compiler”, which is currently the standard in the current version of Mesa Driver in most distros. To get the best out of the content in this article, it is very important that you know what a shader compiler is, and in turn the ACO. If you do not know what it is about, I strongly recommend that you read the article we wrote on the subject.
Now that you know what we’re talking about, let’s get to the news.
Last Monday (25), the Mesa Driver development team included in its code a Implementation which was already under review for four months. If we are going to analyze the time it took to keep such an implementation under review, it is not necessary to be an IT professional to realize that it is something quite complex. Following the logic, an implementation with a relatively high level of complexity will also bring great benefits.
Such an implementation, which among developers is being called “load / store vectorizer”, is a contribution from developer Rhys Perry. What it does is, in a simplified way, decrease the amount of code that the shader compiler needs to work on to perform certain tasks. This behavior reduces the number of simultaneous memory operations, and the lower this number, the shorter the loading times, and the higher the FPS rate.
To date, tests have been carried out with two games, namely Nier: Automata and GTA V. In these tests, a decrease in the number of memory operations of 13% and 15%, respectively, was noted. It is worth mentioning that the benefits must be visible in games other than the two that were tested, as well as other 3D applications.
These implementations are expected to be available to users in version 20.0 of Mesa Driver, which is expected to be released as stable in late February.
We have said this several times here at Diolinux, and I repeat how I am more and more surprised and excited by the speed with which «Linux» has evolved as a platform for games, especially in the last two or three years. It is really impressive!
Now tell us what is your opinion on the matter. Will it ever be that «Linux» will become a gaming platform considered «mainstream»?
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That’s all, folks! ?
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