In the realm of PC gaming, there is an enormous industry push toward open-source graphics APIs like Vulkan. Performant, cross-platform software like Vulkan enables the incredible performance of games like Doom Eternal and allows low budget titles like Farming Simulator 22 to run on Mac OS X and Linux.
Gaming juggernaut Microsoft have maintained DirectX dominance through its Xbox brand and studio acquisitions, and now it seems to be creeping into Mesa, Linux and BSD’s open-source software implementation of OpenGL. Jesse Natalie, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, is working on adding and improving D3D12 compute support in OpenGL through Mesa and hints that future enhancements are in the pipeline. From Jesse"s merge request:
This adds some parallel state tracking for compute. In some cases, graphics state tracking is simply extended (e.g. resources bound to shaders), in others, it"s duplicated (e.g. additional pipeline caches), and in others it"s refactored. The final result is support for compute ARB_compute_shader with a bit of a slow path for indirects. Now that compute support is available, we can start hooking up compute shaders for things that need emulation in the future, like a faster path for indirect dispatches that need state vars.
While the purpose of D3D12 compute shader support in Mesa is not clear, it could be advantageous in the data center. Perhaps in Azure, where Microsoft offers GPU optimized VMs for workloads that require more specialized silicon. It’s worth noting that this merge request, and the work it builds upon, is not related to any official port of DirectX 12 to Linux.
Source: gitlab.freedesktop.org via Phoronix