HasVK Trims Some Fat For This Old Intel Hardware Vulkan Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HasVK Trims Some Fat For This Old Intel Hardware Vulkan Driver

With the new Mesa 22.3 release one of the changes for vintage hardware users is the introduction of "HasVK" as a Vulkan driver forked from Intel's ANV codebase...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-HasVK-Drop-Dead-Code

[Tian]

" Vulkan support on Gen7/Gen8 hardware isn't too useful either"Strong dissagrement with this phrase, vulkan suport on thouse gen is the only thing it makes worth to change their users from windows to linux and is the only thing it allows them to play d3d10/11 games on linux.

[Vorpal]

" Vulkan support on Gen7/Gen8 hardware isn't too useful either"Strong dissagrement with this phrase, vulkan suport on thouse gen is the only thing it makes worth to change their users from windows to linux and is the only thing it allows them to play d3d10/11 games on linux.

"The only reason" is putting it strongly. Getting rid of the bloatware with ads that is Windows 10 and later is another good reason.

[Tian]

"The only reason" is putting it strongly. Getting rid of the bloatware with ads that is Windows 10 and later is another good reason.

yeah, I might have exagerated with "the only reason" but is a big reason still, in my case bigger than ads and bloatware given that I rarely used the windows menu and did not have vulkan support in windows (celeron n3050).

[chocolate]

" Vulkan support on Gen7/Gen8 hardware isn't too useful either"Strong dissagrement with this phrase, vulkan suport on thouse gen is the only thing it makes worth to change their users from windows to linux and is the only thing it allows them to play d3d10/11 games on linux.

Wait, does HasVK work with recent versions of Proton? Doesn't DXVK require features not found in that Vulkan implementation? Good to know, if it does. That would be impressive.
I hope those Vulkan drivers will at least remain useful for desktop usage, to leverage the new paths in modern toolkits and desktop environments.

[NM64]

" Vulkan support on Gen7/Gen8 hardware isn't too useful either"Strong dissagrement with this phrase, vulkan suport on thouse gen is the only thing it makes worth to change their users from windows to linux and is the only thing it allows them to play d3d10/11 games on linux.

Don't forgot that Vulkan on Haswell straight-up isn't supported on Windows!

Furthermore, LGA1150 hardware is a sort of king in terms of dirt-cheap used bang-per-buck PC hardware due to its use of DDR3 and it being the last platform that supports Xeon CPUs on consumer hardware (you can readily get a 3.5GHz 4core/8thread Xeon with an iGPU for a mere $30 USD, or without an iGPU for more like $20 USD).

And, for an emulation enthusiast like myself, Haswell for whatever reason is weirdly faster per-GHz in emulation workloads than Ivy Bridge (like 20-30% faster) to the point that even Zen2 only just matches it in such workloads. Not only that, but many emulators for consoles made since year 2000 use Vulkan as their primary render path and, because emulation cares much more about CPU performance than GPU performance, integrated graphics tend to work quite well as long as you aren't using very high resolutions.

(and those emulators that don't use Vulkan pretty much always use OpenGL, and Haswell isn't exactly known for having "quality" OpenGL drivers on Windows...)

Bonus: Haswell even supports OpenCL image support via beignet-opencl-icd (though this is only supported on slightly-older OSes like Ubuntu 20.04, Mint 20.3, etc).


Now if only LGA1150 Broadwell wasn't such a "half-baked" product with low supply on the used market, then we could have had the option for full-fat Gen8 graphics, but they're expensive enough that even older Ryzen APUs go for cheaper on the used market which makes them a bit of a moot point.

[Tian]

Wait, does HasVK work with recent versions of Proton? Doesn't DXVK require features not found in that Vulkan implementation? Good to know, if it does. That would be impressive.
I hope those Vulkan drivers will at least remain useful for desktop usage, to leverage the new paths in modern toolkits and desktop environments.

it does in my hardware at least (celeron n3050)

[Tian]

Don't forgot that Vulkan on Haswell straight-up isn't supported on Windows!

Furthermore, LGA1150 hardware is a sort of king in terms of dirt-cheap used bang-per-buck PC hardware due to its use of DDR3 and it being the last platform that supports Xeon CPUs on consumer hardware (you can readily get a 3.5GHz 4core/8thread Xeon with an iGPU for a mere $30 USD, or without an iGPU for more like $20 USD).

And, for an emulation enthusiast like myself, Haswell for whatever reason is weirdly faster per-GHz in emulation workloads than Ivy Bridge (like 20-30% faster) to the point that even Zen2 only just matches it in such workloads. Not only that, but many emulators for consoles made since year 2000 use Vulkan as their primary render path and, because emulation cares much more about CPU performance than GPU performance, integrated graphics tend to work quite well as long as you aren't using very high resolutions.

(and those emulators that don't use Vulkan pretty much always use OpenGL, and Haswell isn't exactly known for having "quality" OpenGL drivers on Windows...)

Bonus: Haswell even supports OpenCL image support via beignet-opencl-icd (though this is only supported on slightly-older OSes like Ubuntu 20.04, Mint 20.3, etc).


Now if only LGA1150 Broadwell wasn't such a "half-baked" product with low supply on the used market, then we could have had the option for full-fat Gen8 graphics, but they're expensive enough that even older Ryzen APUs go for cheaper on the used market which makes them a bit of a moot point.

the thing is hasvk is not only for haswell, braswell is also in the list and it works fine just fine with vulkan. About opencl I hope (more like dream) that rusticl will ad support for intel cpus that relied on beignet.

[NM64]

braswell is also in the list and it works fine just fine with vulkan

Though, for my emulation-related interests, braswell is quite lacking on the single-threaded CPU front, so that's a use-case you can eliminate since the emulators that its CPU would be fast enough for (e.g. consoles before 2000) are the kind that are more likely to use OpenGL anyway.

[Leopard]

Don't forgot that Vulkan on Haswell straight-up isn't supported on Windows!

Furthermore, LGA1150 hardware is a sort of king in terms of dirt-cheap used bang-per-buck PC hardware due to its use of DDR3 and it being the last platform that supports Xeon CPUs on consumer hardware (you can readily get a 3.5GHz 4core/8thread Xeon with an iGPU for a mere $30 USD, or without an iGPU for more like $20 USD).

And, for an emulation enthusiast like myself, Haswell for whatever reason is weirdly faster per-GHz in emulation workloads than Ivy Bridge (like 20-30% faster) to the point that even Zen2 only just matches it in such workloads. Not only that, but many emulators for consoles made since year 2000 use Vulkan as their primary render path and, because emulation cares much more about CPU performance than GPU performance, integrated graphics tend to work quite well as long as you aren't using very high resolutions.

(and those emulators that don't use Vulkan pretty much always use OpenGL, and Haswell isn't exactly known for having "quality" OpenGL drivers on Windows...)

Bonus: Haswell even supports OpenCL image support via beignet-opencl-icd (though this is only supported on slightly-older OSes like Ubuntu 20.04, Mint 20.3, etc).


Now if only LGA1150 Broadwell wasn't such a "half-baked" product with low supply on the used market, then we could have had the option for full-fat Gen8 graphics, but they're expensive enough that even older Ryzen APUs go for cheaper on the used market which makes them a bit of a moot point.

Having Vulkan support on Windows is not a critical feature at all. Like 99 percent of the users of those chips won't know what Vulkan is or what a graphics api is but it won't be important as basically everything that is essential would be working.