Great news from Valve. It seems they sponsored a new Mesa shader compiler for AMD gpus, called ACO. It is currently available for Arch based systems via AUR, and for Ubuntu based systems via PPAs. Others will need to compile from sources available on git.
I wonder if someone is willing to create and maintain a repo for openSUSE tumbleweed so that openSUSE users can help testing this without switching to other distributions.
Info Post: https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1602634609636894200
Howto install: https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1640915206474070669/
I just read an article on Phoronix about this.
Wen I googled ACO and openSUSE I found this thread.
It’s great news indeed.
Open source AMD driver is faster then the proprietary driver already. (Phoronix benchmarks)
With ACO it even improves more.
Should we help Valve? 
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail/1602634609636894200
I was a first worried and sceptic about Valve. Would they do what it takes of give up after a while?
Sadly only Arch Ubuntu and Fedora are listed as distro for which they have a package.
I am gonna do some searching though, if I can find out what it takes to do this on openSUSE.
HowTo described at Phoronix.
I can’t find any info openSUSE related.
I have been thinking, and since I am on Tumbleweed, I will probably already have latest mesa, or will be getting it soon
Same goes for the Kernel.
So it comes down to a shader compiler, that replaces llvm, which is still being developed, and should do better for games.
Valve would like us us to report bugs.
I did find this:
https://software.opensuse.org/download/package?package=Mesa-libEGL1&project=home%3Apawp%3Abranches%3Amesa-aco
Could it be that’s all I need ?
I looked in yast and I am on mesa 20 and kernel 5.6.
I looked at phoronix again, and added the repository from my previous post, but for now disabled it.
It seems I would need a newer mesa too. (dev version)
Might be better for me to just wait for now.
ACO is already merged with mesa master branch as far as I get it.
But that branch is not yet the version I have.
It looks like if I just wait, I will have ACO soon anyway.
https://github.com/Tk-Glitch/PKGBUILDS/issues/312
Initially ACO is for the RADV Vulkan driver but it may be brought to the RadeonSI OpenGL driver in the future. At the moment ACO is in good shape for Volcanic Islands through Vega while the Navi shader support is in primitive form.
Just a few minutes ago the 25,000+ lines of code implementing ACO was merged into Mesa 19.3, which will premiere as stable in December.
The ACO back-end with RADV isn’t enabled by default at this time but requires setting the RADV_PERFTEST=aco environment variable to activate. Having this mainline is great news for encouraging more testing and feedback. We’ll be running some fresh ACO benchmarks shortly for providing the latest Radeon Vulkan performance numbers for Linux gaming.
- updates for GCN 1.0 and Navi were included in a newer Mesa 3D.
About +10% for a FPS.
Good, but not excellent.