Mesa driver developers discuss expanding profiles and driver tuning for specific apps and games

Developer Natalie Vock working for Valve has put up a discussion plan for improving app profiles and driver tuning for Mesa drivers. Currently, RADV (the AMD Vulkan driver) makes use of various app-specific profiles to tune various apps and games, but they're looking to make the whole system better and perhaps roll it out to more drivers.

As mentioned by Vock, the current system is not particularly great with DriConf:

• Right now, options for a game apply pretty much anytime, regardless of system configuration. driconf should have a way to make options dependent on things like GPU architecture/generation.
• Adding more options is quite cumbersome. IIRC there's roughly 4 places you need to add a new macro to a list (or similar) until a new option gets picked up properly. Ideally we'd retire all that macro stuff and move to something like having a python script define possible options, and generating the rest of the code in python as well. That approach seems to have worked out quite well across multiple places in the tree.

So they're seeking feedback on what to do about it, to see if developers on other graphics drivers want to get involved in improving it. This includes ideas like expanding it to include a "potential framework for shader replacement/tuning", along with trying to figure out where all of these configurations would actually go. Another issue brought up is potentially separating them from Mesa releases, for times where they need changes to come quicker, like when a brand new big game needs workarounds that these tweaks could apply.

On top of that the subject of user customization also came up, like exposing more options to users (and making them easier to use) as there's only so much that driver developers can test themselves - like how on Windows drivers come with apps with various tuning options.

Nice to see so many open source driver improvements over the last year, and this seems like a great initiative to get moving on.

See the full post on the GitLab issue.