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Landing in the public Mesa-git mailing list within the last few minutes, more games have been added to the whitelist to make use of threaded OpenGL for better performance.

From the commit:
QuotePerformance delta on Core i5-4570 + Radeon R9 270:
  • Overlord: +20% in certain locations
  • Overlord II: +20% in certain locations
  • Oil Rush: +12% in most locations
  • War Thunder: +4-9% in benchmarks
  • Saints Row 2: +10-35% in certain locations

If I counted correctly, that's now 14 games (13 native, 1 in Wine) in total that have the feature turned on.

I imagine this small patch, that simply adds their names into the drirc file (which tells Mesa to turn the feature on for these games) will be picked to be included in Mesa 17.2. The next version of Mesa is currently in the Release Candidate stages, with the first RC tagged yesterday.

Nice to see more games getting some proper testing. I really think a whitelist was the best way to go, the last thing we want are games performing worse forcing you to turn it off manually for certain games. A better out of the box experience for Mesa is quite essential in my opinion.

Reminder: Mesa 17.2 is due for release next month. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Drivers, Mesa, OpenGL
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12 comments
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edo Jul 25, 2017
Im getting the impression that windows amd driver isnt faster anymore, at least on the same level
Shmerl Jul 26, 2017
Does glthread use all available cores, or it's limited to certain number of threads?


Last edited by Shmerl on 26 July 2017 at 1:06 am UTC
HollowSoldier Jul 26, 2017
Quoting: edoIm getting the impression that windows amd driver isnt faster anymore, at least on the same level
Windows OpenGL driver is as crappy as ever, being on fglrx levels of crappiness, only more stable. D3D and Vulkan drivers are fine though.
Marc Di Luzio Jul 26, 2017
  • Game Dev
  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: ShmerlDoes glthread use all available cores, or it's limited to certain number of threads?

IIRC it only offloads the driver work to a second thread, GL is still basically a single command queue so there's not a huge amount more than can be done in the driver.


Last edited by Marc Di Luzio on 26 July 2017 at 9:39 am UTC
ripper Jul 26, 2017
If anybody wants to help out testing more games, here are instructions:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread
Sir_Diealot Jul 26, 2017
You can always just add games yourself. You should report it to the devs if it works though.
Liam Dawe Jul 26, 2017
Quoting: ripperIf anybody wants to help out testing more games, here are instructions:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread
What's with all the "disabled" entries, in the Improves Performance section?
bolokanar Jul 27, 2017
Didn't both Overlord use wrapper?


Last edited by bolokanar on 27 July 2017 at 8:20 am UTC
ripper Jul 27, 2017
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: ripperIf anybody wants to help out testing more games, here are instructions:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread
What's with all the "disabled" entries, in the Improves Performance section?

I added a note at https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread#Results_template and also renamed it to make it a bit more obvious. Quoting from https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Performance_impact_of_Mesa_glthread#Measuring_FPS :

QuoteEven if you enable glthread, Mesa can still decide to disable it for compatibility.

That unfortunately happens for majority of titles (so glthread has no impact at all, can't be enabled). Marek said there are some issue that could be resolved, but my impression was that nobody intends to work on those at the moment.
ripper Jul 27, 2017
Quoting: sbolokanovDidn't both Overlord use wrapper?

I don't know, but that doesn't really matter. Bioshock Infinite uses a wrapper (EON) too. And it improves some titles even with Wine. This is about single-threaded submission into the OpenGL command queue, not about the technology the game uses.
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