Zink Is Almost In Mesa For Offering OpenGL 2.1 / GLES 2.0 Over Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zink Is Almost In Mesa For Offering OpenGL 2.1 / GLES 2.0 Over Vulkan

Zink is the year-old effort led by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund on developing a Mesa driver that maps OpenGL over Vulkan. It's now nearly within Mesa pending the merge request to actually add it...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-Mesa-MR-Almost-Reality

[R41N3R]

This is fantastic new! I really excited to try this soon. OpenGL 2.1 is enough for several older games and I might be able to even run maybe kwin with this :-)

[shmerl]

May be that will help replacing radeonsi with it eventually, to avoid all the bugs that plague it on Navi. But surely not before it hits OpenGL 4.x.

[trek]

zink will allow users of nvidia propertary drivers to use gallium nine on wine!

[oleid]

zink will allow users of nvidia propertary drivers to use gallium nine on wine!

Does it? Wouldn't zink have to be gallium over vulkan in order to support gallium nine?

Edit : you're right, the initial blog post suggests that it might be possible

3. Enable more integration

Because Zink is implemented as a Gallium driver in Mesa, there's some interesting side-benefits that comes "for free". For instance, projects like Gallium Nine or Clover could in theory work on top of the i965 Vulkan driver through Zink. Please note that this hasn't really been tested, though. It should also be possible to run Zink on top of a closed-source Vulkan driver, and still get proper window system integration. Not that I promote the idea of using a closed-source Vulkan driver.

[DebianLinuxero]

This reminds me the times of 3DFX.

The OpenGL / Mesa driver wasn't a direct to metal implementation but a 3DFX glide over one.

[mannerov]

zink will allow users of nvidia propertary drivers to use gallium nine on wine!

There won't be nine support when zink is ready. It needs more bits of work. Until someone works these specific bits there won't be support.

[Mani]

There won't be nine support when zink is ready. It needs more bits of work. Until someone works these specific bits there won 't be support.

Also why go the route dx->9->vulkan(Zink) if you can as easily use d9vk and cut out the middleman?

[lumks]

I see the real benefit in the distant future, where you dont need to write any kind of OpenGL driver for your new architecture, but only a Vulkan one and get OpenGL/+ES for free. Right now zink is more of a "who cares?" thing.

[trek]

Also why go the route dx->9->vulkan(Zink) if you can as easily use d9vk and cut out the middleman?

because gallium nine runs really fast and without glitches!