Mesa 24.1 Zink Lands "Super Fast" Merge Request To Optimize IO

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has merged a big optimization / bug fixing effort he's recently been tackling for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

Last week Blumenkrantz blogged about this Zink initiative in his usual colorful character. With that he concluded, "So far, all I’ve seen is about a 6000% improvement across the board. Finally, it’s over." Of course, that's not necessarily his scientific measurement but long story short he's been tackling a big project on Zink around IO optimizations.

On Friday that was followed up with this brief blog post:

Quick Post
Super Fast

Just a quick post to let everyone know that I have clicked merge on the vroom MR. Once it lands, you can test the added performance gains with ZINK_DEBUG=ioopt.

I’ll be enabling this by default in the next month or so once a new GL CTS release happens that fixes all the hundreds of broken tests which would otherwise regress. With that said, I’ve tested it on a number of games and benchmarks, and everything works as expected.

Have fun.

The merge is the zink: compiler rewrites / opt_varyings for delivering some nice IO optimizations to Zink. No benchmark numbers were provided but I'll be giving the ZINK_DEBUG=ioopt mode a whirl soon for looking at the performance difference. As stated by Mike, the code should be enabled by default once a new OpenGL conformance test suite (CTS) release happens to fix broken tests in this mode.