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Testing new Mesa ACO shader compiler for AMD
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Shmerl Jul 4, 2019
Quoting: GuestYou asked specifically about X4, I missed that part. Early in the morning. I tried it, but the results are the same, game starts, no overlay and than the game crashes quite fast.

Yeah, the hang is ACO related, but I was interested in why the overlay is not showing up. I.e. same thing happens with regular Mesa (except no hang). Anyway, it's really off-topic for ACO testing. I opened a Mesa bug.
MayeulC Jul 4, 2019
Quoting: x_wingI was wondering, should we clear the shaders cache?

I would like to see benchmarks with an empty shader cache, since this compiler was specifically designed with low compilation latency in mind :)

changing XDG_CACHE_DIR or whatever it is called should be enough, AFAIK, if you don't want to get rid of your old cache.

Quoting: chancho_zombie
Quoting: ShmerlJust tried Mesa-aco with X4: Foundations, and it works briefly, but then causes a GPU hang. I also didn't manage to make Mesa Vulkan overlay work with it for some reason. Did anyone try that?

for me Batman Arkham Knight has some freezes with dxvk. But overall, testing a few games with DXVK, framerates do increase notably.

Could those freezes be due to building up the shader chache?
sr_ls_boy Jul 4, 2019
What mesa version is this ACO shader compiler forked from. Is it 19.1.X or the unreleased 19.2?
Doing comparisons against the wrong mesa version won't mean anything.
x_wing Jul 4, 2019
Quoting: sr_ls_boyWhat mesa version is this ACO shader compiler forked from. Is it 19.1.X or the unreleased 19.2?
Doing comparisons against the wrong mesa version won't mean anything.

It's 19.2, AFAIK. In order to do a useful test, you should always run tests using the same compiled libraries with llvm and without it. From my point of view, that's the only way to get a fair results to compare.
dubigrasu Jul 4, 2019
Anyone tested Dying Light yet? The game is working OK, but everything is predominately gray (new compiler on/off doesn't matter) with this Mesa build:
sr_ls_boy Jul 4, 2019
I have my answer. Commit 6cc213b3c123a636baf07511c8e17ca32fb5da5a
to be exact. Which is 19.2-git.
Shmerl Jul 4, 2019
Quoting: GuestSo I tried compiling Mesa myself for the first time. Before I used the ppa referenced in the news article on GoL. I used your script @Shmerl but that did not work. I built the newest version of meson 0.51 but it kept looping endlessly on regenerating build files. Then I figured it is due to the compiler option meson --native-files and I deleted that.

Interesting. I'm still on Meson 0.49. Did newer Meson remove --native-files option? That part was needed to set correct llvm version when building, since my script supports choosing that.

Once Debian testing will get unfrozen (soon) and packages will refresh, I'll update my script if anything will be broken.

Quoting: GuestAfter that everything compiled and I tried launching vulkaninfo and games with LD_LIBRARY_PATH and VK_ICD_FILENAMES referenced to the build but all die saying bad driver.
What am I missing?

Not sure. How does the resulting ICD file look like? Does it point to the right location of .so? If not, place it where you want it, and manually edit the ICD JSON to point to the right place.
Shmerl Jul 4, 2019
Quoting: sr_ls_boyWhat mesa version is this ACO shader compiler forked from. Is it 19.1.X or the unreleased 19.2?
Doing comparisons against the wrong mesa version won't mean anything.

They probably rebase it on Mesa master periodically. But you can compare it to itself. I.e. simply disable ACO using environment variable, and it will use the default llvm path:

RADV_PERFTEST=llvm

So no need to build stock Mesa separately for testing.
dubigrasu Jul 4, 2019
Short test of Rise of the Tomb Raider with Proton, Very High settings:

Average FPS, LLVM > ACO
Spine of the Mountain: 84.1 > 88.8
Prophets Tomb: 66.0 > 67.4
Geothermal Valley: 65.1 > 66.4

And here are the frametimes (all three tests combined):



Clearly better frametimes for ACO.
Shmerl Jul 4, 2019
How did you build the graph? And did you collect the data using Mesa Vulkan overlay log?
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