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

[phoronix]

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

Years ago particularly when the open-source Linux GPU drivers were in their infancy it was known in some cases having to fake/spoof the GPU driver name or model in order to workaround artificial bugs / problematic code paths targeted to a particular OpenGL driver or even to achieve greater performance. With a new Mesa merge request called "Unleash the dragon!", this is still very much a problem in 2021 even now in the Android space...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenGL-Drivers-2021-Faking-It

[ruthan]

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.

[timofonic]

Typical. It happened and will happen always. Game developers and publishers get money because of dirty tactics, mobile world is quite dark too.

I wonder if the same happens with Vulkan...

[Leopard]

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.

Vendor name is faked if i get it correctly. So instead of reporting Freedreno to the games, they report what Qualcomm blob would be showing as it is name.

So games doesn't actually behave on what driver can do/chip can do but instead behaving differently depending on vendor string.

[aufkrawall]

More than five years after Vulkan, this is still (all?) GL. Meanwhile, Apple have made a clean slate with Metal 1/2. Good job, Google!

[perpetually high]

Hey, fake it til you make it, right? It's worked for me so far

[soulsource]

More than five years after Vulkan, this is still (all?) GL. Meanwhile, Apple have made a clean slate with Metal 1/2. Good job, Google!

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.

[user1]

Does anyone know how widely Vulkan is used on Android? All I heard is some report long before Android 10 was released, that Android 10's UI will use Vulkan for rendering. Apart from that, I didn't see anything else. And it seems the vast majority of Android games still use OpenGL ES.

[microcode]

More than five years after Vulkan, this is still (all?) GL. Meanwhile, Apple have made a clean slate with Metal 1/2. Good job, Google!

GLES games on iOS are still very common. Just because they added Metal doesn't mean they can actually ditch GLES. On Android, Vulkan has been a mandatory part of the platform for years by now; it is up to developers to choose at the end of the day.

[skeevy420]

This is the driver version of:

Now you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, but you cain't call me Johnson.