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It has been a while since we officially spoke to Feral Interactive about their Linux ports, with the last time being in June 2014. It’s time to get reacquainted and see where things stand right now.
The code for OpenGL threaded GL dispatch is now finally in Mesa-git, after multiple developers attempts to fix it up. This should improve performance in multiple games for users of the open source Mesa drivers.
It seems Feral Interactive are busy bees behind the scenes towards something, as one of their developers has sent in another patch for the Mesa 'radv' Vulkan driver.
DiRT Rally seemed to have an issue with rendering properly in certain cases with newer versions of LLVM with RadeonSI Mesa (AMD), but it seems to have been tracked down as an issue in LLVM.
I'm sure plenty of you will be happy with this, as Mesa now has the shader cache enabled by default in Mesa-git to allow for wider testing. It may be turned off for Mesa 17.1, if wider testing shows issues with it.
The recent Mesa release of Mesa 17.0.0 included a patch from a Feral Interactive developer, but Feral aren't stopping there. Another developer from Feral has had two patches accepted into Mesa-git today.
You may remember recently I wrote about 'threaded GL dispatch' in Mesa possibly getting merged, after AMD's Marek suggested it and there was some backlash, well, it has continued.
Just a note to not get overly excited about threaded OpenGL in Mesa. While it's true it could help a bunch of games, there's also games it likely won't help or even make worse. Feral Interactive's ports already do it, and I'm sure others do too.
Marek, the Mesa developer from AMD posted a message to the public Mesa-dev mailing list asking to merge the threaded GL dispatch code and get it cleaned up to help with the high CPU overhead of Mesa.
Samuel Pitoiset from Valve has sent in yet another patch to Mesa, this one focuses on the ARK games: ARK Survival Evolved and Survival Of The Fittest to to run without overrides.
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.