Zink really seems to have the potential to get within striking distance or practically at parity with native OpenGL drivers. In some cases, this was already true with Zink even before this latest peformance breakthrough. Once it gets even close to native OpenGL driver performance, driver maintainers and Mesa developers should really consider deprecating native OpenGL drivers and concentrate on making the best possible Vulkan drivers, and assisting with further development of Zink. If Mike Blumenkrantz managed to get Zink to be this good from scratch, all by himself, imagine how much it can be improved even further, once a lot of driver development get freed up due to no longer having to maintain separate hardware-specific OpenGL drivers?
Eventually, it makes one wonder if Gallium3D will even remain useful, since Vulkan can perfectly play that same lower layer closer-to-the-metal role as well. Gallium3D will only continue to have value for legacy hardware that lack the features necessary to support Vulkan. Even some older generation hardware such as Terascale (supported by the r600 driver) could theoretically have a Vulkan driver developed for it, which might ease support for such older beasts in the longer term.
And when it comes to newer generation GPUs still to be released, the manufacturers and driver developers would be crazy to waste any more resources on developing Vulkan drivers and OpenGL drivers in parallel. Just focus entirely on Vulkan drivers, and let Zink handle the OpenGL stuff..
Eventually, it makes one wonder if Gallium3D will even remain useful, since Vulkan can perfectly play that same lower layer closer-to-the-metal role as well. Gallium3D will only continue to have value for legacy hardware that lack the features necessary to support Vulkan. Even some older generation hardware such as Terascale (supported by the r600 driver) could theoretically have a Vulkan driver developed for it, which might ease support for such older beasts in the longer term.
And when it comes to newer generation GPUs still to be released, the manufacturers and driver developers would be crazy to waste any more resources on developing Vulkan drivers and OpenGL drivers in parallel. Just focus entirely on Vulkan drivers, and let Zink handle the OpenGL stuff..
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