Valve Developed An Intel Linux Vulkan GPU Driver

[duby229]

I suspect the current sutuation with opecl1.1 on gallium3d will be similar to the situation with vulkan on gallium3d.

[schmidtbag]

I wasn't aware there was intel hardware currently available that is Vulkan compatible.

Personally, I'd have been more interested in Valve doing this to the radeonSI or nouveau drivers since intel doesn't need any 3rd party assistance. But, considering the state of nouveau, I can understand why they didn't attempt that.

[-MacNuke-]

I wasn't aware there was intel hardware currently available that is Vulkan compatible.

To be compatible with Vulkan the hardware has to support the feature level of OpenGL ES 3.1. This is the level of a current High End Smartphone.

[blackout23]

My thoughts exactly...

Gallium3D is a state tracker and Vulkan is a stateless API...

Vulkan is more or less a Virtual Machine and the drivers have to execute the given SPIR-V code. I can not see any usefulness in Gallium3D or Mesa.

A "simple" kernel driver with all the Userland-Tools should be enough. All hard work is done in userland by the application.

So there probably won't be a /usr/lib/libvk.so, but every game ships its own like on Windows with d3d9.dll. Which is actually cool, because that allows stuff like the ENB Series for Skyrim & Co. I'm not sure you could do the same with current OpenGL right now.

To be compatible with Vulkan the hardware has to support the feature level of OpenGL ES 3.1. This is the level of a current High End Smartphone.

Or OpenGL 4.3 where OpenGL ES 3.1 is basically a subset of that. Both introduced compute shaders. Ivy Bridge Hardware does compute with Direct3D 11, but they never released OpenGL 4.3 drivers so in theory Vulkan should work on Ivy Bridge and newer.

A fragment of the talk is online here:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/59557323

John McDonald answered a question about hardware support towards the end.

[Svartalf]

Next implement full OpenGL on top of that for faster performance and easier adoption of the GL 4.x spec. John McDonald of Valve hinted that you probably could do that.
https://twitter.com/basisspace/statu...82010403807232

Theoretically, you could adjust Mesa3D to be just that.

[Svartalf]

Wow; Valve really does not let anything get in their way, do they?

At this point, no, they don't.

[eydee]

I wonder why people think Valve's work is based on Intel's driver. What if it's written from scratch?

[-MacNuke-]

So there probably won't be a /usr/lib/libvk.so, but every game ships its own like on Windows with d3d9.dll. Which is actually cool, because that allows stuff like the ENB Series for Skyrim & Co. I'm not sure you could do the same with current OpenGL right now.

Some games even ship the glibc

But there has to be a library which talks to the driver. Closed Source games will ship it (like in Mantle) but this is nothing new.

[haagch]

Perhaps you're right the gallium way is not adequate for Vulkan but i think they chose intel for a much simpler reason:
It's the only official opensource driver out there...

radeon/radeonsi is not "official"?

[blackout23]

Some games even ship the glibc

Yeah but you could not do that with libGL.so afaik, since they are vendor specific implementations.