Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Performance Looking Very Good For Intel Arc Graphics

[schmidtbag]

Seems to me something is wrong with the Gallium driver, because I don't see why something so mature would fall behind like that. After all, as ResponseWriterhas pointed out, radeonsi is still ahead of Zink.

In any case, congrats to Mike for doing a great job - I definitely don't want to detract from that.

[ayumu]

Oh wow, at this point opengl drivers should be put into the garbage bin.

In the first place, opengl has always been a relatively high level API.

Implementing it on top of a lower level API which abstracts the hardware such as Vulkan is a logical fit.

[rmfx]

We would like to see some radv + zink vs radeonsi benchmarks in a few weeks when both are using the new vk ext for shader_object fully implemented.

[user1]

Seems to me something is wrong with the Gallium driver, because I don't see why something so mature would fall behind like that. After all, as ResponseWriterhas pointed out, radeonsi is still ahead of Zink.

In any case, congrats to Mike for doing a great job - I definitely don't want to detract from that.

I think it's because Doom 2016 in OpenGL mode for some reason spoofs Nvidia in some cases on Mesa drivers and Doom's Nvidia GL rendering path might simply be much more optimized. As you can see, the vendor is identified as "Intel" on Iris and "Nvidia" on Zink.
I've tried Doom 2016 in OpenGL mode on radeonsi and the vendor was also identified as "Nvidia" and I was surprised that the performance was almost on par with Doom 2016 in Vulkan mode (on radv).

[marlock]

why would a game go through the trouble of having separate OpenGL implementations for Intel, Nvidia and AMD?

ow, wait... they're for Windows, not a native linux game

I wonder how much of this non-optimal coding for AMD gpus was really necessary due to windows drivers implementation/performance divergences between brands and how much might have been Nvidia anticompetitive practices

[Rallos Zek]

Oh wow, at this point opengl drivers should be put into the garbage bin.

Nope! OpenGL is far easier and faster to write and debug for than Vuljan or DirextX 12 code.

[marlock]

Nope! OpenGL is far easier and faster to write and debug for than Vuljan or DirextX 12 code.

modern GPUs will absolutely need DX12 and Vulkan driver support, so one point of Zink is that once that's done you can stop, full OpenGL support has also been achieved with zero extra cost.

The other point is having a plan B when you find that the direct driver support for OpenGL in a GPU that has it is flawed or poorly optimized to the point that Zink runs better.

Finally it allows much much much easier integration between OpenGL and Vulkan in apps that are crazy enough to use both together for whatever reason... Which is generally not the case with direct driver support for OpenGL in an also Vulkan-ready GPU.

Like X-Plane (an example of OpenGL+Vulkan interop AND of Zink delivering a single standardized quirk-free OpenGL implementation the game can count on everywhere)

https://developer.x-plane.com/2023/02/addressing-plugin-flickering/