News: 0001615576

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Mesa PanVK Driver Seeing Up To 25.7x Speedup For MSAA

([Mesa] 4 Hours Ago Massive MSAA Win)


The open-source PanVK driver providing Vulkan support for modern Arm Mali graphics hardware is seeing big speed-ups in the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance in Vulkan tests as a result of new code merged today to Mesa 26.1.

Faith Ekstrand has been working on adapting the Arm Mali PanVK driver to using a new frame-buffer abstraction and ultimately helping out the multi-sample anti-aliasing performance around properly handling MSAA resolves.

The exciting takeaway from the now-merged code is:

"Finally, this MR also improves MSAA resolves by doing the resolve in a frame shader at the end of the render pass when we can. This massively improves the performance of the Sascha Willems multisampling example:

With 2x MSAA: 590 -> 2605 (4.4x speedup)

With 4x MSAA: 347 -> 2570 (7.4x speedup)

With 8x MSAA: 188 FPS -> 2494 FPS (13.2x speedup)

With 16x MSAA: 96.7 FPS -> 2483 FPS (25.7x speedup)"

At 2x MSAA there is "only" a 4.4x speed-up but at 16x MSAA is as much as a 25.7x speed-up with this new code.

Wow! See [1]this merge request for those using/interesting in the PanVK driver on Arm Mali hardware.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/39759


`Lasu' Releases SAG 0.3 -- Freeware Book Takes Paves For New World Order
by staff writers

Helsinki, Finland, August 6, 1995 -- In a surprise movement, Lars
``Lasu'' Wirzenius today released the 0.3 edition of the ``Linux System
Administrators' Guide''. Already an industry non-classic, the new
version sports such overwhelming features as an overview of a Linux
system, a completely new climbing session in a tree, and a list of
acknowledgements in the introduction.
The SAG, as the book is affectionately called, is one of the
corner stones of the Linux Documentation Project. ``We at the LDP feel
that we wouldn't be able to produce anything at all, that all our work
would be futile, if it weren't for the SAG,'' says Matt Welsh, director
of LDP, Inc.
The new version is still distributed freely, now even with a
copyright that allows modification. ``More dough,'' explains the author.
Despite insistent rumors about blatant commercialization, the SAG will
probably remain free. ``Even more dough,'' promises the author.
The author refuses to comment on Windows NT and Windows 96
versions, claiming not to understand what the question is about.
Industry gossip, however, tells that Bill Gates, co-founder and CEO of
Microsoft, producer of the Windows series of video games, has visited
Helsinki several times this year. Despite of this, Linus Torvalds,
author of the word processor Linux with which the SAG was written, is
not worried. ``We'll have world domination real soon now, anyway,'' he
explains, ``for 1.4 at the lastest.''
...
-- Lars Wirzenius <wirzeniu@cs.helsinki.fi>
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