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)

Yes a lot of nice things have gone in to Mesa's GLSL the past year:

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

More improvements coming in:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTgzMDk

Today, the initial patches for a shader cache landed -- storing compiled OpenGL shaders on the disk so they can be quickly reloaded in the future rather than having to be re-compiled each time. SHA1 sums are used for matching to the shader cache and ensuring no differences.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... he-Landing

Thanks for keeping us posted codeape! I do like reading these articles.

DWMagus wrote:Thanks for keeping us posted codeape! I do like reading these articles.

NP I am happy that you like it