"Kopper" Merged Into Mesa As A Big Win For Zink

[oibaf]

Some more info on the author blog: https://www.supergoodcode.com/big-marge/

[Linuxxx]

What is the point of running existing drivers on Zink instead of the "native" opengl implementation by intel/nvidia/amd?

With each new generation, it seems as though GPU designers are optimizing the hardware to the needs of low-level APIs such as Vulkan.

A good example of this evolution is nVidia:
AFAIK, Turing was the first arch to be more optimized towards Vulkan rather than OpenGL loads.

Examples:

- DXVK & VKD3D are running pretty good on Turing whereas the generation prior, namely Pascal, has trouble running them as performantly as the hardware should theoratically allow, which is a hardware shortcoming that can't be fixed, according to the DXVK lead developer.

- Nintendo's Switch supports Vulkan, but because the GPU is a Maxwell part, performance is likely many times lower than the native API, thus basically unused.

- Last but certainly not least:
Blumenkrantz himself has demonstrated that Zink can beat nVidia's native OpenGL driver on Turing (and therefore likely on Ampere aswell).

[RahulSundaram]

What lower level control are you talking about? - if you want low level control you'd use Vulkan, OpenGL is not a low level API.

That's what I have said as well as evident in "What they meant by that is that Vulkan is more low level than OpenGL" Maybe the double negation in the next sentence is tripping it up for you.

[R41N3R]

What is the point of running existing drivers on Zink instead of the "native" opengl implementation by intel/nvidia/amd?

Compatibility, if you never experienced any issue with Open GL drivers, you are lucky. But for validating a driver issue, Zink is great.

And then there is hardware without a Open GL driver, a good example is panvk.

Plus there are people like me that would prefer to run the complete system on Vulkan :-)

[Linuxxx]

What lower level control are you talking about? - if you want low level control you'd use Vulkan, OpenGL is not a low level API.

Learn to read...

BTW, how much longer do we have to wait for that Russian victory?

According to your Serbian prediction, the Ukraine should have been enslaved by now, no?

[timofonic]

What lower level control are you talking about? - if you want low level control you'd use Vulkan, OpenGL is not a low level API.

Please improve your reading comprehension, it meant that.

[cl333r]

BTW, how much longer do we have to wait for that Russian victory?
According to your Serbian prediction, the Ukraine should have been enslaved by now, no?

About 6-12 months, though the Ukrainian army destroyed its own bridges and its Volkssturm and the nazies are killing its own people, including in Bucha.

[remenic]

What lower level control are you talking about? - if you want low level control you'd use Vulkan, OpenGL is not a low level API.

What defines a low level API then? I think there are multiple levels to APIs. You can create abstractions on top of OpenGL that would make OpenGL the 'low level API'. But OpenGL wasn't low enough, so they made an even lower level API, called Vulkan. And I'm guessing that you can even go lower than that, ask the Mesa guys.

[loganj]

so from now on we should say zink + Kopper for opengl over vulkan.

[Quackdoc]

I wonder if this could effectively be used for multiseat.