• RadeonSI Gets NIR Improvements, Enabled By Default For Civilization VI

  The RadeonSI NIR back-end as an alternative to its longstanding TGSI usage continues to be improved upon as a prerequisite for supporting OpenGL 4.6 with SPIR-V ingestion. A fresh batch of RadeonSI NIR work was merged today, including to enable it by default for one Linux game.

  Several developers landed the latest NIR code into Mesa 19.1 Git on Monday, including Marek Olšák who added a radeonsi_enable_nir option to DriConf for allowing the NIR usage to be flipped on a per-game/per-executable basis. Up to now users had to manually set R600_DEBUG=nir (or now, AMD_DEBUG=nir as the other syntax now supported in recent days with Mesa 19.1). But now with this DriConf option, it can "whitelist" games as needed.

• mesa 19.0.0-rc5

  Hi List,

  Hot off the press is mesa 19.0-rc5. Due to a number of still opened bugs in the
  release tracker this will not be the final release, and I predict at least one
  more release candidate before the final release happens.

  Just an FYI, I will not be working Thursday or Friday this week, so if I don't
  respond to nominations after tommorrow don't be surprised

  Anyway, in the rc5 release we have a little bit of everything, but not too much
  of any one thing:

  - nir
  - radv
  - v3d
  - intel
  - swr
  - anv
  - spirv
  - meson
  - radeonsi

  Dylan

• Mesa 19.0-RC5 Released As The Cycle Drags Into Overtime

  Mesa 19.0-RC5 was issued a short time ago as the latest release candidate for Mesa 19.0. Due to blocker bugs remaining, at least one more release candidate is likely next week before seeing the official release.

  The 19.0 bug tracker still shows more than a half dozen bugs blocking the release. These blocker bugs range from 1~2% performance regressions in Unigine benchmarks with Skylake graphics to other random performance regressions and also some test case failures on the Intel side.

• NVIDIA 418.31.03 Linux Driver Has Fixes For Hitman 2 On DXVK, Warhammer II Linux Fix

  Following today's Vulkan 1.1.101 release, NVIDIA has debuted a new Vulkan beta driver for Linux (and Windows) users.

  The new NVIDIA Linux 418.31.03 driver update adds in the new VK_NV_cooperative_matrix and VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable extensions from today's 1.1.101 update. There are also two known fixes for games on Linux.

• NVIDIA has a new Vulkan beta driver, fixes for Hitman 2 with DXVK and Total War Warhammer II

  NVIDIA have again pushed out a brand new Vulkan beta driver, with version 418.31.03 now available with game fixes and new extensions.

  As a reminder, these drivers are a special series all by themselves, done outside of their normal driver series to test new features, new API extensions and other interesting stuff.

While we have talked about the possibilities of writing a Vulkan Wayland compositor and there was even a short-lived Vulkan renderer for KDE's KWin, it's also possible to write a X11 window manager around the Vulkan interfaces.

Chamferwm is a new tiling X11 window manager that features a Vulkan compositor. Chamferwm doesn't support Wayland at this point but is written using Vulkan and XCB for the X11 bits. This tiling window manager already supports a lot of standard window management functionality, all rendering is done with Vulkan and there is support for user-supplied shaders for decorations/borders, and support as well for using an external compositor.

• Intel Preps For Discrete Graphics Cards With Linux Patches

  Intel has confirmed that recent patches to its Linux graphics driver were related to its continued work on preparing the ecosystem for its new line of discrete graphics cards.

  Phoronix reported that Intel released 42 such patches with more than 4,000 lines of code between them on February 14. The main purpose of the patches was to introduce the concept of memory regions in "preparation for upcoming devices with device local memory." (Such as, you know, discrete graphics cards.)

  [...]

  Still, any information about Intel's graphics plans is welcome. Right now the graphics market is dominated by AMD and Nvidia, and as we noted in December, Intel is probably the only company that even has a possibility of successfully introducing a new discrete graphics architecture. Why not enjoy the occasional glimpse behind the curtain as that architecture's being built?

• SVT-VP9 Is Intel's Latest Open-Source Video Encoder Yielding High Performance VP9

  At the start of the month Intel open-sourced SVT-AV1 aiming for high-performance AV1 video encoding on CPUs. That complemented their existing SVT-HEVC encoder for H.265 content and already SVT-AV1 has been seeing nice performance improvements. Intel now has released SVT-VP9 as a speedy open-source VP9 video encoder.

  Uploaded on Friday was the initial public open-source commit of SVT-VP9, the Intel Scalable Video Technology VP9 encoder. With this encoder they are focusing on being able to provide real-time encoding of up to two 4Kp60 streams on an Intel Xeon Gold 6140 processor. SVT-VP9 is under a BSD-style license and currently runs on Windows and Linux.