Yes a lot of nice things have gone in to Mesa's GLSL the past year:JoshParnell wrote: Yes, this is the first time I've ever gotten the full game running (well) on the open-source Mesa drivers. I'm not sure if I made some incredible improvement, or if Mesa made some incredible improvement, or a little bit of both (last time I tried it appeared to me that Mesa's shader optimization was so painfully slow that the scalar field shaders couldn't even compile)
Optimizations over the past year on their shader test cache show SIMD16 programs increasing from 88.6% to 97.8%, 43k shader samples improved, about a 10% reduction in the number of loops in programs, around 16% cut in the number of basic blocks, and around 92% less CFG calculations. On top of that, many new Steam on Linux games are beginning to just work fine.
Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTgxMDI
Other highlights from that page:
- The page has some links to some low level technical stuff.
- Going from GLSL 1.40 to GLSL 3.30 compliance
- The new "NIR" intermediate representation