Zink In Mesa For OpenGL Over Vulkan Should Be Back To Supporting OpenGL 3.0 Soon

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zink In Mesa For OpenGL Over Vulkan Should Be Back To Supporting OpenGL 3.0 Soon

Zink, the project going on for almost two years for implementing OpenGL over Vulkan, might soon be exposing OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL ES 2.0 within mainline Mesa...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-OpenGL-3.0-Soon

[TemplarGR]

This is going to be a very important project in the future, even if it is not that important right now. Vulkan is the future, eventually most hardware will only support Vulkan natively and will require emulation layers for all other higher level APIs. It is more efficient that way. Google has the same idea with Android.

[R41N3R]

I'm as well excited about Zink and it is great to see it progressing. Having OpenGL 3.0 will be quite helpful to get several applications and games working, I do not care to loose some performance, but to use Vulkan (RADV) now even for OpenGL seems right. It worked really well already for Direct3D!

[franglais125]

This is something nice to keep track of, thanks Michael

For instance, as Ivybridge and Haswell now rely on the maintenance-only i965 driver, perhaps over time they will work better on Zink, as both chips support Vulkan.

[monkeynut]

Wonder if this will allow the Videocore 6 to support desktop Opengl 3.0+

[SilverBird775]

For instance, as Ivybridge and Haswell now rely on the maintenance-only i965 driver, perhaps over time they will work better on Zink, as both chips support Vulkan.

Wish it to be so. Vulkan support for Gen7 is on life support as well. We can only pray for it to not be discontinued and kicked off. The latest so much demanded emulation for component mappings in texture views had a massive blow to performance so it is no more a clear winner to opengl. It made Vulkan usable but for a high cost. The workaraunds in Vulkan have a painful performance tax because of its low-level nature as it cannot be tricked cheap ways. The whole Vulkan support for this generation is barebones.

For example the DXVK made Gen7 to work with a simple but costly workaround. The author do not plan to support hardware without proper Vulkan support and Ivybridge\Haswell are always walking an edge here and happen to work by "coincidence".

So I do not expect Zinc to be any distant and viable replacement for Ivybridge's native OpenGL.