Mesa 22.0 Zink Speeds Up OpenGL-Over-Vulkan On CPUs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 22.0 Zink Speeds Up OpenGL-Over-Vulkan On CPUs

While there is already LLVMpipe Gallium3D for software acceleration of OpenGL on CPUs within Mesa, if wanting to increase the layers of abstraction you could also use Zink for OpenGL over Vulkan and by way of Lavapipe have that software accelerated on the CPU. With Mesa 22.0-devel, that route of Zink on CPUs is now faster...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zink-Mesa-22.0-Faster-CPU

[schmidtbag]

I would be super interested to see if there is a game made within the past decade that at medium/high settings and 1080p could be playable using this and one of the dual-Epyc servers. Sure, it's totally pointless, but it would be super impressive.

Also what would be interesting is playing a game like CS:GO at low details and observing the frame time. Even if the frame rate isn't all that high, since there wouldn't be much back-and-forth communication to the GPU, I imagine latency would be really good.
Again, totally pointless, just an interesting experiment IMO.

[mangeek]

I imagine this has some positive implications for running VMs that make use of OpenGL. If Zink-on-lavapipe is faster and gets us OpenGL 4.6/ES 2.1, experience of 3D within VMs using CPU-emulated graphics will be better, right?

[oiaohm]

I would be super interested to see if there is a game made within the past decade that at medium/high settings and 1080p could be playable using this and one of the dual-Epyc servers. Sure, it's totally pointless, but it would be super impressive.

Also what would be interesting is playing a game like CS:GO at low details and observing the frame time. Even if the frame rate isn't all that high, since there wouldn't be much back-and-forth communication to the GPU, I imagine latency would be really good.
Again, totally pointless, just an interesting experiment IMO.

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=M2_VGA#Specifications

Of course wacky would be to use a M.2 Vga graphics card in a dual-Epyc system to play a game.

[arQon]

I imagine this has some positive implications for running VMs that make use of OpenGL. If Zink-on-lavapipe is faster and gets us OpenGL 4.6/ES 2.1, experience of 3D within VMs using CPU-emulated graphics will be better, right?

jep, that's where my train of thought went first too. VirtualBox's video driver (which is really VMWare's SVGA driver, now FOSS) supports GL passthrough, but only up to GL2 (eesh). To get even just as far as 3.3 you have to disable accel completely, so even if you're just doing stats/etc it's still slow as dirt. Anything that potentially improves those cases is welcome.

I keep hoping for VMSVGA to just get Vulkan support wired up properly and then just leave everything else to Zink, as that's pretty clearly the only way it's ever going to progress at this point, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any interest in it from the companies involved. (It may well be that with WSL now trying to claim desktop virtualisaion there never will be any interest in improving cross-platform video support, as the market for it must be pretty tiny, especially now - but it's still something I think would be very nice to see someday).