Low performance with Mesa 23.1 (GPL)

[SethDusek]

Your system information

• System information from steam (Steam -> Help -> System Information) in a gist: https://gist.github.com/SethDusek/1512626d707369a5ba8a9182e2133616
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
• Are you using the latest stable video driver available for your system? Yes, Mesa 23.1 via flatpak
• Have you verified the game files?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

Describe what you expected should happen and what did happen. Please link any large pastes as a Github Gist.

I was waiting for GPL to finally be stable because I hoped it would perhaps address some of the hitching/lag I get during games. But instead it seems to have gotten worse. Where before my FPS would dip to like 50 (around half of what it normally is), now it dips to 38 or lower. Which is kind of dissapointing when combod with the overall poor performance.

But I thought it would be helpful to submit this report anyway since I know work on GPL is still ongoing. I wanted to try it out earlier but I ran into a bug with one of the older versions of Mesa where Dota 2 would consume 90% of RAM, so I waited for Mesa 23.1 and it seems this hasn't helped.

I could try running Dota 2 with RADV_PERFTEST=nogpl if it helps, but considering stuttering is intermittent, I'm not sure how long it'd take me to gather data and compare my results

[kisak-valve]

Hello @SethDusek, it might be worthwhile to give https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/9117 a read and see if the discussion there is relevant.

Specifically, if you completely close Steam, then run the Flatpak equivalent of MESA_DISK_CACHE_DATABASE=true steam and making sure that Steam's shader pre-caching runs for Dota 2 have an effect? The intent here is to compare mesa's folder tree cache to the single file cache option, and also avoid comparing a warm shader cache to a new shader cache.

[SethDusek]

Hi, apologies for the delay, but previously I had shader caching completely disabled and decided to test it for a few games before I reply with my experience. With MESA_DISK_CACHE_DATABASE=true and shader pre-caching enabled, performance seems to be slightly (?) better, but I still get performance drops at some moments of the game, even when not in an intense teamfight for example. But my minimum FPS seems to be better than it was previously (50-ish instead of around 39). If there's any way to get profiling data from Dota 2 when these lag spikes happen, I'd be happy to provide the data