Zink Mesa 21.3-dev Benchmarks - Increasingly Capable Of Running OpenGL Games Atop Vulkan

[andrei_me]

The current gap for Snx between pro drivers and Mesa is ~2% with my private branch.

How long until it goes mainline?

[schmidtbag]

To the haters who criticize Zink while still in dev branch… seriously?? You know hour long it takes to write and optimize gpu drivers?

I basically run as fast / half speed / 10 percent speeed. That’s means fully working / slight bottleneck / big bottleneck.

I am sure that will change a lot in the coming months.

Let's not forget too that:
1. This is still a very young driver.
2. To my understanding, it's mostly made by volunteers.
3. It's a translation layer, which is going to result in some performance loss.
4. It's not device-specific, so optimizations are finite.

These are incredible results considering the above.

[tildearrow]

I understand zink is to run opengl on devices that only support vulkan but what are some examples of devices that only support vulkan and not opengl

Mobile devices don't fully support OpenGL (only ES), but those do support Vulkan.

[illwieckz]

Interesting to see Xonotic is now faster on zink than on radeonsi. On Unvanquished side I noticed some weeks ago that zink performance was comparable to amdgpu-pro (so acceptable but a bit behind radeonsi), I may retry with a recent zink to see how it evolved.

[marek]

Wunder how zync will perform under cad workload. Specviewperf is heavily optimized by quadro and firepro drivers while the standard drivers lack 20x in performance ( siemens nx).

The current gap for Snx between pro drivers and Mesa is ~2% with my private branch.

[strtj]

That was "10x relative to the previous Zink implementation" not "10x as fast as a native OpenGL driver".

Yes, that is what I was referring to. The largest performance improvement that I saw, percentage wise, was in ET:Legacy which was (459.5/214.6)=2.14x improvement.

[simburde]

I understand zink is to run opengl on devices that only support vulkan but what are some examples of devices that only support vulkan and not opengl

How about Android?

[bridgman]

"code that could deliver 10x the performance for some games" - wake me up when anything even close to this actually happens. I barely saw 2x on the most favorable real-world benchmark.

That was "10x relative to the previous Zink implementation" not "10x as fast as a native OpenGL driver".

I have to say that this is some really impressive progress, particularly considering that it is being benched against radeonsi.

[GruenSein]

I understand zink is to run opengl on devices that only support vulkan but what are some examples of devices that only support vulkan and not opengl

I don't think there are devices which are limited to only Vulkan by their hardware. Rather, this is meant to facilitate decent OpenGL support on devices without a comprehensive driver development community. When you have only a few developers, they can focus on getting a decent Vulkan driver up and running and OpenGL support is then provided without further development effort via Zink. Since Vulkan drivers are said to be simpler than OpenGL drivers, this is an enormous advantage for smaller teams. Of course, AMD, Nvidia and Intel have the resources to provide a dedicated OpenGL driver but various ARM SoCs could benefit from this, for example.

[spykes]

I understand zink is to run opengl on devices that only support vulkan but what are some examples of devices that only support vulkan and not opengl

Having a "meta-driver" on top of Vulkan will also homogenize OpenGL behaviour on various applications which is a real plus considering the nightmare it is to target this API with the various half-baked OGL drivers there are out there.