Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Now Nearly At ~69% Of Intel's Native OpenGL Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Now Nearly At ~69% Of Intel's Native OpenGL Driver

The Zink Gallium3D code for Mesa that is mapping OpenGL on top of the Vulkan API continues making great progress particularly with the near-daily work by developer Mike Blumenkrantz...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...ulkan-Intel-69

[piorunz]

That's why I love open source 😊
But can someone tell me please , what is this driver aiming to replace? It's a improvement of open source Intel GPU driver, yes? It will render OpenGL through newer Vulkan? Why would this be required or needed?
Thanks.

[SteamPunker]

Although the developer is currently using the Intel Vulkan driver for development and testing of Zink, he isn't developing it only for Intel hardware. He's probably developing this on an Intel GPU because it currently has the most mature open source Vulkan driver.

Basically Zink is an OpenGL wrapper on top of Vulkan, which makes sense, because Vulkan is a more low-level API than OpenGL. The problem with OpenGL has been that is basically somewhere between a driver and a library. It does too much for a driver and is a bit too unwieldy to be considered a convenient 3D library.

With a wrapper like this, drivers will be able to focus excusively on high quality Vulkan drivers for various hardware, without also having to develop and maintain OpenGL drivers for the same hardware.

I expect future GPUs to only get Vulkan drivers in Linux, relying completely on Zink for OpenGL support.

Also, once Zink can be used on top of MoltenVK, it will finally allow the use of newer OpenGL versions on macOS as well, since Apple deprecated OpenGL in favor of their proprietary Metal API and froze their OpenGL support at an earlier OpenGL level 4.1 or 4.2, I believe).

Kudos to Mike Blumenkrantz for this amazing work! 😊

[oleid]

Quite interesting! I wonder how the ratio is between zink and AMD's opengl driver.

[GruenSein]

That's why I love open source 😊
But can someone tell me please , what is this driver aiming to replace? It's a improvement of open source Intel GPU driver, yes? It will render OpenGL through newer Vulkan? Why would this be required or needed?
Thanks.

I think, the main purpose of this are less mainstream projects. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all provide decent OpenGL drivers for their hardware and usually those native drivers should outperform a translation layer running on a Vulkan driver. However, OpenGL in itself is much more complex than Vulkan and many implementations have non-standard behavior to deal with. This leads me to believe that smaller efforts for some SoCs without comprehensive driver support on Linux will benefit the most since they can now work on a simpler, smaller, and more straight-forward Vulkan driver and get OpenGL for free by sacrificing some performance.

[polarathene]

I think I asked this some time ago, and even got a reply from the Zink developer, but can't seem to locate it.

Would this be usable with nvidia proprietary drivers? Could it technically enable open-source OpenGL driver on top of the proprietary vulkan one? The visual issues I experience aren't so bad these days (and I'm not 100% sure if they're specifically due to nvidia, but they probably are), still if this can open up that door for better compatibility it'd be cool. Not sure if it'd help with GBM + Wayland compatibility for nvidia?

[polarathene]

This leads me to believe that smaller efforts for some SoCs without comprehensive driver support on Linux will benefit the most since they can now work on a simpler, smaller, and more straight-forward Vulkan driver and get OpenGL for free by sacrificing some performance.

And more importantly, so long as the Vulkan driver support is good on those SoCs, they all benefit/share the OpenGL Zink driver development right? So instead of individually contributing/maintaining OpenGL drivers, those vendors or communities could focus efforts and time elsewhere instead of re-implementing support for doing X (like we're kinda experiencing with Wayland compositors I think?), sort of like how wlroots benefits more than one desktop environment.

[JoshuaAshton]

> Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Now Nearly At ~69% Of Intel's Native OpenGL Driver

Nice 😎

[oibaf]

Quite interesting! I wonder how the ratio is between zink and AMD's opengl driver.

Interesting question, given radv has the ACO compiler, which is still missing on radeonsi.

[miskol]

I don't know about status of Vulkan drivers on windows. But it will be nice to have chrome/chromium and webgl runnig over this to vulkan.
As for now they use angle and they pass it to DirectX
Maybe if they pass it to Vulkan it will be faster in long term