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Marek, the well known contributor to Mesa has been working on some form of Mesa OpenGL threading, and his test showed a 70% improvement for Borderlands 2. See the commit here.

It's worth noting that Marek didn't start this work. It was originally by Paul Berry and Eric Anholt, but Marek has picked it up to flip the switch.

As exciting as this is, it should also be noted that this could adversely affect some games, while improving others. Games that already do a form of it will likely see a reduction in performance, as it's doing it again, some games may see nothing, but games not doing it will possibly see a performance increase.

What it will do, is allow you to use:
Quotemesa_glthread=true


So it works in a similar way to the Nvidia one already available in the proprietary Nvidia driver:
Quote__GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1


Edwin from Feral has already noted that Feral games probably won't benefit, since they already do a form of this in their games directly. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Shmerl Oct 30, 2016
Looks like Vega + radenosi will be a solid combination, if this will make it in in time.
veccher Oct 30, 2016
just a noob question: how to update mesa drivers? i need to recompile kernel or something like this or it's kinda automatic in updates like the ones from ubuntu update center.
TheGZeus Oct 30, 2016
Sweet?!
I got sick of stuttering, so I've been playing on ps4, but I hate joystick aiming, so TVHM is a slog.
Shmerl Oct 30, 2016
Normally mesa is updated by the distro, but it's not done often, and surely not from the master or some custom branch. For master or custom branches you'd need to build Mesa from source and figure out what dependencies it needs (DRI and etc.). It's not trivial and requires some research. Dependency on certain feature of kernel driver (like amdgpu) can also be an issue. So you'd either need to get a custom kernel, or install it as a kernel module.

I'd be interested in such guide myself for example for Debian testing.


Last edited by Shmerl on 30 October 2016 at 8:32 pm UTC
tuxintuxedo Oct 30, 2016
Ubuntu LTS versions offer kernel and Mesa updates a few months after a new distribution. For 16.04 this means kernel 4.8 and Mesa 12 early next year. You can also use ppa-s, like oibaf's one, which have more bleeding edge Mesa versions.


Last edited by tuxintuxedo on 30 October 2016 at 8:37 pm UTC
dragev Oct 30, 2016
Quoting: veccherjust a noob question: how to update mesa drivers? i need to recompile kernel or something like this or it's kinda automatic in updates like the ones from ubuntu update center.

Add oibaf or padoka ppas if you use ubuntu. They are usually updated at least once a week. They might be a bit unstable though, since they are "bleeding-edge", so be prepared to do a rollback(using ppa-purge and a dist-upgrade).
tmtvl Oct 30, 2016
Just use an up-to-date distro, like Arch or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
M@GOid Oct 30, 2016
Quoting: tuxintuxedoUbuntu LTS versions offer kernel and Mesa updates a few months after a new distribution. For 16.04 this means kernel 4.8 and Mesa 12 early next year. You can also use ppa-s, like oibaf's one, which have more bleeding edge Mesa versions.

It is about 4 months after a new release. So Ubuntu 16.04 will get 16.10 graphics stack in February.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

Quoting: veccherjust a noob question: how to update mesa drivers? i need to recompile kernel or something like this or it's kinda automatic in updates like the ones from ubuntu update center.

If you want bleeding edge stuff, install Padoka's PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/mesa

He updates once or twice a week, and you get all the packages needed. Oibaf updates daily (I find annoying) and he didn't updates Ubuntu LLVM stuff, witch is important, performance wise, to AMD cards.

If a update screw up things, you can roll back using "sudo ppa-purge ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/mesa"


Last edited by M@GOid on 30 October 2016 at 11:08 pm UTC
Creak Oct 31, 2016
Quoting: TheGZeusSweet?!
I got sick of stuttering, so I've been playing on ps4, but I hate joystick aiming, so TVHM is a slog.

I think stuttering are more due to shader compilation. Once the shader cache feature will be in mesa, we will have way less freezes and stuttering.


Last edited by Creak on 31 October 2016 at 12:07 am UTC
Luke_Nukem Oct 31, 2016
Quoting: tmtvlJust use an up-to-date distro, like Arch or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

These days I argue that openSUSE is better than Arch; it's well tested, uses openQA for verification, uses a much better packagemanager (which is very fast, and better than yum too), properly splits out debugging symbols/languages/source/includes, and is backed by a company and people that produce an enterprise grade Linux.

Arch is for ricers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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