OpenGL Drivers In 2021 Still Sadly Benefit From Faking Their Driver Name / GPU

[unic0rn]

How the hell are they running these games in the first place? A compatibility layer for android games on regular arm linux? Android userspace on a linux kernel/drivers?

android is basically using a linux kernel, more or less, and mesa can be compiled for android.

so they're just running android with mesa drivers.

in case of linux on arm, you can probably just run android under qemu with decent performance - opengl will be passed to the linux host, and since you're running on arm, there's no need for cpu emulation, so it should run close to native speed.

[Laser]

Khronos never communicated Vulkan as a replacement for OpenGL, but rather as a lower-level alternative. They iirc recommend sticking to OpenGL for projects that do not have the budget to benefit from very low level rendering control.

I'm sure that in practice, the fate of OpenGL is sealed. There'll be so few use cases that any resources put into it are wasted. For most stuff, I'm sure Zinc will be sufficient. If you use an existing engine, chances are it already supports Vulkan and you don't actually have to get your hands dirty.

[unic0rn]

Sigh........I really don't like these kinds of stupid hardware checks in apps and games. Unless it's to work around a bug or severe performance issue, they cause more problems than they solve.

So many times where you remove device/hardware specific checks and oh gee it works correctly and performance is amazing.

it's precisely about bugs and performance issues.

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and-opengl-drivers-hall-fameshame/

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/08/14/state-of-android/

as you can see, things have improved during the years, and are still improving, but at the same time serious bugs are still there. if someone has some older device with even older kernel and drivers, driver quality will likely be all over the place. there's a reason google decided to put angle in android 10 and above. hopefully it'll end up being the standard for opengl es support on android - i don't like such wrappers when native drivers are an option, but properly tested and fast enough wrapper is better than completely fucked up drivers.

[robclark]

How the hell are they running these games in the first place? A compatibility layer for android games on regular arm linux? Android userspace on a linux kernel/drivers?

ChromeOS supports running android apps/games.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/701964/

[brad0]

I'm sure that in practice, the fate of OpenGL is sealed. There'll be so few use cases that any resources put into it are wasted. For most stuff, I'm sure Zinc will be sufficient. If you use an existing engine, chances are it already supports Vulkan and you don't actually have to get your hands dirty.

Then the real world kicks in and none of that holds true.

[robclark]

Then the real world kicks in and none of that holds true.

Agreed, the overhead of zink is *waaay* too much.. I think we'll continue to see native gl drivers until the combination of (a) all new games that are pushing the limits are vk and (b) hardware advances have made existing/legacy gl games fast enough with gl on vk. So I guess that is at least 3-5yrs?

[W.Irrkopf]

I dont understand what is faked. Older games cant without updates just expect what open drivers are better.. Unless some vendor gpu asNvidia tegra is faked.

How about looking into the linked merge request to find the specific patch to answer that? In short: It changes the vendor-string and the renderer-string.

[osw89]

Sigh........I really don't like these kinds of stupid hardware checks in apps and games.

Not that surprising since these probably badly written games for devices running a severely outdated kernel.

[Quackdoc]

How the hell are they running these games in the first place? A compatibility layer for android games on regular arm linux? Android userspace on a linux kernel/drivers?

Chrome OS, a few roms are using Mesa, and android x86 is using mesa, those are likely the biggest factors.