Raspberry Pi OpenGL Driver Seeing Faster Blit Support Come Mesa 21.0

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi Vulkan Driver Seeing Faster Blit Support Come Mesa 21.0

Raspberry Pi's V3DV Vulkan driver is on quite a streak lately. In addition to inclusion in Mesa 20.3, Vulkan 1.0 conformance, and Wayland support, more performance work is being pursued with those initial milestones reached...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RPi-V3DV-Faster-Blits

[grigi]

Makes me feel that running my desktop from a Pi should be much more feasible than ever.

[spykes]

I can't wait for Gnome to pick up Vulkan as a compositor back-end, it will really boost animations smoothness on the Raspberry Pi4.

[tornado99]

Makes me feel that running my desktop from a Pi should be much more feasible than ever.

My understanding is that all of these Pi Kernel announcments are to do with 3D acceleration, whereas the desktop UI is 2D so unaffected. Is that correct?

[brent]

No, Vulkan won't speed up anything much for this use case. Desktop compositors are mostly bound by fillrate, not draw calls. It doesn't really make much sense to port mutter/gnome-shell to Vulkan TBH (much work for little to no gain) and that's probably why no one has seriously investigated it yet.

[Danny3]

I can't wait for Gnome to pick up Vulkan as a compositor back-end, it will really boost animations smoothness on the Raspberry Pi4.

Same here, but for KDE.

[spykes]

No, Vulkan won't speed up anything much for this use case. Desktop compositors are mostly bound by fillrate, not draw calls. It doesn't really make much sense to port mutter/gnome-shell to Vulkan TBH (much work for little to no gain) and that's probably why no one has seriously investigated it yet.

Vulkan is not just about having more draw calls. The fact that it's stateless and has better profiling tools is also important.