Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan Driver - Performance Is Turning Out Better Than Expected

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zink OpenGL-Over-Vulkan Driver - Performance Is Turning Out Better Than Expected

When looking at the performance of Zink's OpenGL over Vulkan implementation just about one year ago the performance had a lot to be desired. But since then they have patches bringing it all the way to OpenGL 4.6 compared to the OpenGL 2.1 days and there has also been a lot of work on the performance. The performance at least for select operations is now turning out better than even the developers were expecting...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-GL-Over-VLK-Perf-2020

[aufkrawall]

It'd be nice if it could be used to run entire Xorg/Wayland sessions without GL. I tested Xorg and it starts, but shows a lot of corruption.

[GruenSein]

It'd be nice if it could be used to run entire Xorg/Wayland sessions without GL. I tested Xorg and it starts, but shows a lot of corruption.

TBH it would be impressive if Zink could handle all that. From a technical point of view, I feel that accelerating compositor and toolkit rendering via Vulkan directly is the far superior route to take.

[aufkrawall]

From a technical point of view, I feel that accelerating compositor and toolkit rendering via Vulkan directly is the far superior route to take.

Certainly, but look how GL-centric even Wayland compositors are to this date.
But performance shouldn't be an issue for any 2D task with any half-decent mobile GPU. I basically want to have it to get rid of LLVM shader compiler on AMD (as ACO for RadeonSI probably will still take a while). RDNA2 release is already giving me the creeps.

[R41N3R]

Very exciting :-) Can't wait to try it. OpenGL 4.6 via Zink is a very impressive achivement!

[rmfx]

Soon, systems will have only native Vulkan drivers and wrappers for the rest. That’s a nice clean up.

[eydee]

It would be interesting to see how it compares vs Windows AMD OGL drivers.

[boxie]

Soon, systems will have only native Vulkan drivers and wrappers for the rest. That’s a nice clean up.

i suppose you *could* do that, if you wanted, but you would no doubt be giving up a bunch of performance

[zxy_thf]

Certainly, but look how GL-centric even Wayland compositors are to this date.
But performance shouldn't be an issue for any 2D task with any half-decent mobile GPU. I basically want to have it to get rid of LLVM shader compiler on AMD (as ACO for RadeonSI probably will still take a while). RDNA2 release is already giving me the creeps.

We probably won't see the deprecation of GL in Wayland for a while, until we are all deprecating pre-Vulkan GPUs, which is, well, only slightly easier than deprecating non-AVX2 processors. (both were launched around 2012)

For 2D tasks, the GPU performance is not a problem, but CPU performance/PM may be better by ripping off the overhead from OpenGL.

[skeevy420]

We probably won't see the deprecation of GL in Wayland for a while, until we are all deprecating pre-Vulkan GPUs, which is, well, only slightly easier than deprecating non-AVX2 processors. (both were launched around 2012)

For 2D tasks, the GPU performance is not a problem, but CPU performance/PM may be better by ripping off the overhead from OpenGL.

I get where you're coming from, but that's not the same because even in 2020 we can still buy non-AVX CPUs brand new from Intel. Until Intel quits making these shitty ass Atom CPUs we'll never get to a point where mainstream distributions can consider depreciating non-AVX CPUs period.

With GPUs and graphics technology, neither AMD nor NVIDIA release new GPUs with old technology outside of various product refreshes between generations like GTX 1600/1650 or RX 480/580 as well as they almost always support the older graphics technologies outside of multimedia CODECs (whistling in Mantle). Just imagine if AMD released the RX 5300 that was announced the other day as nothing more than a PITCAIRN XT refresh instead as a low end Navi. Because that's what an Atom is from a consumer perspective and, IMHO, is the biggest way that Intel is holding the community back.

If AMD and NVIDIA (and Intel for that matter) still released non-Vulkan GPUs it would be a more apples to apples comparison.