[Mesa-dev] [Bug 93352] GRID Autosport crashes on start of race

[Timothy Arceri]

On Mon, 2015-12-14 at 09:46 -0500, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
> Hi Edwin,
> 
> Thanks for reaching out to the mesa community! See my comments
> inline.
> 
> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 5:13 AM,  <bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org>
> wrote:
> > Comment # 20 on bug 93352 from Edwin Smith
> > My name is Edwin Smith and I work for Feral Interactive who make
> > the Linux
> > version of the game. Thank you for fixing the issue in the latest
> > drivers, I
> > am
> > sure people playing the game on AMD machines will be very happy!
> > 
> > We tested the game using 11.0.2 and apart from missing features for
> > the
> > higher
> > end effects meaning they had to be disabled we did not see any
> > major
> > rendering
> > issues.
> 
> Odd... this bug should have been visible with radeonsi and nouveau
> when enabling tessellation. Perhaps only on debug builds though (on
> opt builds it would still have been an issue, just no crash).
> 
> > Please let us know if we can assist by providing people working on
> > driver
> > issues a copy of the title or other information to help with your
> > driver
> > work.

Hi Edwin,

A couple of other things to consider. 

1. I believe a number of the games you guys have ported have benchmark
modes but there is no way to run them via the command line (or possibly
no easy way to discover what the switches are) providing this
information would be useful for automated benchmarking. It's been
reported that GRID Autosport may be CPU limited so would be an
interesting case for benchmarking.

2. Mesa developers use a tool called shader-db to test compiler
optimisations, shader compile time etc. You guys might consider
providing some of your shaders for use in this database. Note that they
would need to be provided under an appropriate licence.
Please see the thread from January when the Unity guys did this for
more information [1].

As Ilia mentioned the best solution for providing games to developers
would be a solution similair to the way Value did it where access is
given to an individual for a collection of games. It is useful to
providie access to individuals rather than a single company due to the
open source nature of Mesa, developers are made up of volunteers,
contractors and employees from companies like Redhat as well as
obviously AMD and Intel.

I wanted to make this point for a couple of reasons, firstly the bug
was fixed by Ilia who is a volunteer and does a great job fixing many
bugs for games often without access to the game itself, secondly due to
the sharing of code in Mesa this would have also been an issue in the
Intel driver once the tessellation support lands and Intel employs a
number of contractors such as myself who won't necessarily have access
to everything they do.

Thanks again for reaching out to the mesa community.

Tim

[1] 
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2015-January/073589.html

> 
> The most straight-forward way would be to do the same thing Valve did
> -- basically they provide a (free) package on Steam that includes all
> of their games to people who are active mesa contributors. You can
> see
> the details of their program here:
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-April/081045.htm
> l
> .
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>   -ilia
> _______________________________________________
> mesa-dev mailing list
> mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev