Mesa Open-Source GPU Drivers Enjoyed Near-Record Growth In 2021, Valve Dev Top Contributor

[Quackdoc]

Those GL drivers are already essentially in maintenance mode. They've basically finished GL 4.6 support, and there isn't much more being added now.

It's not clear what switching over to zink would give you, if you aren't actually deleting those drivers. And then you're asking people to be ok with regressions to their driver when they update Mesa to a newer version, which seems unlikely to go very well.

the issue is that they aren't, plenty of spit and elbow grease go into them, even if GL is no longer being extended, though recently a lot more work is being put into developing the gallium replacements for the legacy classic drivers.

[smitty3268]

the issue is that they aren't, plenty of spit and elbow grease go into them, even if GL is no longer being extended, though recently a lot more work is being put into developing the gallium replacements for the legacy classic drivers.

Most of the recent work is going towards improving radeonsi performance in workstation apps, and most of that is gallium state-tracker level changes that apply to zink just as much as radeonsi. And the remaining bits are for micro-optimizations that are unlikely to ever be matched in zink directly.

I don't see that much going into the Intel side of things. The new Intel drivers are for hardware that doesn't support Vulkan, so they'd be needed anyway.

It doesn't appear that AMD is interested in adding new hardware features like raytracing or mesh shaders into their OpenGL drivers, although to be fair it may be that Intel will do so in Iris once their new GPUs are released. That would still need to be added into Gallium and Zink anyway, though, so it's going to be quite a bit of work either way.