1mo ago

Work is being done to allow Nvidium to work on AMD and Intel

github.com Draft: Add GL_EXT_mesh_shader by yuq · Pull Request #640 · KhronosGroup/OpenGL-Registry

This is an OpenGL extension forking VK_EXT_mesh_shader to provide OpenGL mesh shader functionality. Numbers in the spec haven't been allocated, so use fake numbers for now. No header/XML update...

On Java Edition, there is a mod called Nvidium. This mod drastically increases the performance on Nvidia cards. That's because Nvidia implements a feature called "mesh shaders" in OpenGL, but AMD and Intel do not.

But work is now underway to add mesh shader as a standardized feature in OpenGL, and if/when AMD and Intel add support for it, the performance benefits of Nvidium can be brought to AMD and Intel too.

You may wonder why don't AMD and Intel haven't implemented mesh shaders. Well, do they, but only on Vulkan. Nowadays, OpenGL isn't much in games. It has been superseded by Vulkan, but remains around for compatibility reasons and doesn't see much feature development.

2 comments

Ok so maybe a dumb question, if it's implemented in Vulcan, then would running minecraft in proton get the performance?
- Proton includes DXVK and vkd3d, which translates DirectX to Vulkan. There's Zink, which is part of Proton, that translates Vulkan to OpenGL; some new graphics drivers just write a Vulkan driver and use Zink to handle the OpenGL stuff (like the ones written by the Asahi community to make Apple M series chips work on Linux).
  However, there is a project I just found called ANGLE developed by Google that can translate from OpenGL to Vulkan. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this could be adapated to work on Minecraft, if it could work with Nvidium, and if it would even bring performance improvements.
  Really the best thing to do would be for Minecraft Java Edition to natively adopt Vulkan on Windows and Linux. But that's not going to happen since Minecraft is owned by Microsoft.