Experimental Zink Patches Get OpenGL 4.6 Running Atop Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Experimental Zink Patches Get OpenGL 4.6 Running Atop Vulkan

When the Zink Gallium3D driver running OpenGL over Vulkan was first introduced in 2018 and since one of the main blockers besides the performance overhead has been the limited OpenGL 2/3 support. The GL3/GL4 support has been improving with time for Zink and when making use of the latest out-of-tree patches is even possible to get OpenGL 4.6 running over Vulkan with Zink!..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-OpenGL-4.6-On-Vulkan

[AJenbo]

Fantastic work. Will be interesting to see what is possible in terms of optimization from this point.

[bisby]

Obviously at this stage, it is more about compatibility than performance. But is the ultimate goal of this to make future devices not need OpenGL drivers for compatibility and future proofing, or to make OpenGL run faster somehow.

Or neither, and this is purely a proof of concept thought experiment and I've completely missed the point.

[R41N3R]

Wow, fantastic work :-) I didn't expect to see OpenGL 4.6 so soon in Zink! I will try to get this up and running in the next days.

[rmfx]

Cool, but is it meant to work only with people using mesa drivers ?

[bug77]

What's this for? Is there any hardware out there that has Vulkan support, but no OpenGL?
It could be useful if you hit a bug in the driver's OpenGL implementation, but other than that, Idk what I'd use this for.

[rmfx]

What's this for? Is there any hardware out there that has Vulkan support, but no OpenGL?
It could be useful if you hit a bug in the driver's OpenGL implementation, but other than that, Idk what I'd use this for.

It's for having in the future, only a few simple Vulkan drivers to focus on, and manage OpenGL through a wrapper instead of multiple complex drivers.

[Raploz]

What's this for? Is there any hardware out there that has Vulkan support, but no OpenGL?
It could be useful if you hit a bug in the driver's OpenGL implementation, but other than that, Idk what I'd use this for.

As far a I know they're doing this because in the future devs could just make a Vulkan driver and not bother with OpenGL at all.

Google is already doing something similar:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Android-Q-Beta-3-Vulkan

[bug77]

As far a I know they're doing this because in the future devs could just make a Vulkan driver and not bother with OpenGL at all.

Google is already doing something similar:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...-Beta-3-Vulkan

Ok, it could make sense for mobile. I don't see OpenGL going away from the desktop for at least another decade.

[Jedibeeftrix]

wonder if this will help The Dark Mod long-term, as they're showing [no] sign of moving over to the Doom3 engine fork that has vulkan support?

[edited - from "now" to "no"]