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

[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.

[andrei_me]

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

How long until it goes mainline?

[doomie]

i bet this is already faster than radeon ogl on windows :3

[Leopard]

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

Currently there is no such device afaik but Google will likely start to enforce ANGLE on Android for everything ( iirc some new Android versions even has a toggle for developers to test waters ) at some point, which when this happens it will mean there will be tons of devices with just a Vulkan driver.

Implementations like Zink, ANGLE etc are important because you can't throw away backwards compat+ an OpenGL driver is usually a huge undertaking/effort that can be pretty much a huge blocker for a new vendor to get one up and running optimally with most workloads.

[fahrenheit]

ChromeOS is probably the main driver now. At least for ARM devices, you usually only get OpenGL ES and Vulkan drivers.
Of course it would actually be useful to Crostini (vms) if Google:
* Updates the kernel to tge latest LTS
* exposes everything on the host to Virgl
* Virgl vulkan happens (and Google updates stuff)

Currently a way to expose OpenGL 3+ from accelerated OpenGL ES 3.2 would be more helpful

[marek]

How long until it goes mainline?

~1 month to get everything reviewed, probably less.

[andrei_me]

~1 month to get everything reviewed, probably less.

Michael cool stuff coming soon™

[arun54321]

Can window managers like kwin could use this for vulkan rendering?

[Flaburgan]

How does it compare on older GPU, let's say RX580 for example?

[mangeek]

arun54321 , you can run a desktop with the zink driver set for the whole session, including the compositor/WM. It doesn't mean your desktop is running on Vulkan though. All the components are rendering via the OpenGL path, it's just that OpenGL is being translated to Vulkan on the way to the GPU.

I think things are gonna really kick butt on that front once the main toolkits are rendering directly to Vulkan. I've been playing with GSK_RENDERER=vulkan for a bit, but it's not quite working as reliably as GL and NGL backends.