AMD developers have been using OpenGL threads by default in the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, and this change is now available for next quarter’s Mesa 22.3 release, this commit has enabled “glthread”, a threaded OpenGL scheduling, by default in RadeonSI to enhance performance.

RadeonSI has long supported the “glthread” option to execute OpenGL calls on a separate CPU thread. This threaded OpenGL scheduling support is of great help in CPU-intensive games. Now overridden via DriConf or via environment variables, as an optimization option on a per-game basis.

After a recent round of fixes/improvements, glthread is now “full” and “high performance” enough to be enabled by default for AMD RadeonSI drivers.

Obviously, it won’t have an impact on games that are already whitelisted, but it has the potential to help many other games that haven’t been tested by users or developers to see if they’re helped by this OpenGL threading option.