Pierre-Eric, AMD Linux graphics driver engineer, made improvements to Mesa’s generic code to bring faster startup times to Valve’s CS:GO games.

Back in 2016, many Linux users found that CS:GO took a very long time to start on Linux (see this issue for details), and the problem persisted for many years without being resolved.

And recently, while solving another Radeon Mesa problem, AMD engineer Pierre-Eric also found this problem: his CS:GO takes 150 seconds to start… So he set out to optimize the problem,Optimizations to Mesa have focused on faster glTextImage(GL_DEPTH_STENCIL) processing. Dramatically optimized CS:GO startup time by avoiding reading back textures from vRAM, simplifying the _mesa_texstore code, and dropping the 2013 fallback around GL_DEPTH_STENCIL handling.

Now with this optimization patch, CS:GO’s startup time has been reduced from 150 seconds to just 10 seconds.

According to foreign media Phoronix, the merge request for the patch has now landed in Mesa 22.3-devel, and a stable Mesa3D update will be available in the fourth quarter of this year. It’s worth noting that this patch works for Intel (GPU) and AMD (GPU) players and does not affect NVIDIA players.

On the other hand, CS:GO officials also improved the game startup I/O in the September 7th update to reduce the game startup time.