Blumenkrantz Back To Working On Zink Improvements For 2023

[Quackdoc]

There's going to be TONS of vulkan-incompatible hardware out there in some shape or form, which is really the point. They make new ARM chips that can't run vulkan every day.

not to mention that, how vulkan compatible are we talking about, wlroots still doesnt do vulkan on polaris due to missing vk extension, (mpv has no zero copy when using libplacebo too for the same extension)

[Developer12]

So you do not believe that in 2030, you will be in a tiny minority if you choose to still use a laptop from 2015-ish?

Not only will the $200 laptop offerings of 2030 beat the snot out of that 2015 laptop, performance wise - there just will not be any incentive to keep older hardware alive. Terascale 3 was EOL in all AMD based products by 2015. Even XBox One and PS4 had Vulkan capabilities.

So I would argue 15 years of hardware life is beyond great. YMMV.

There's going to be TONS of vulkan-incompatible hardware out there in some shape or form, which is really the point. They make new ARM chips that can't run vulkan every day.

[wertigon]

Maybe you ought to back and read a little more closely: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...72#post1366972

So you do not believe that in 2030, you will be in a tiny minority if you choose to still use a laptop from 2015-ish?

Not only will the $200 laptop offerings of 2030 beat the snot out of that 2015 laptop, performance wise - there just will not be any incentive to keep older hardware alive. Terascale 3 was EOL in all AMD based products by 2015. Even XBox One and PS4 had Vulkan capabilities.

So I would argue 15 years of hardware life is beyond great. YMMV.

[Developer12]

Then you will be one of a few thousands. Meanwhile, a few tens of millions of people will have Vulkan capable hardware and in fact has it already today.

The writing is on the wall, the jump will happen sometime in the next three to five years. Either bite the bullet and get a new laptop, or don't and face the consequences. Up to you.

Maybe you ought to back and read a little more closely: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...72#post1366972

[wertigon]

Almost certainly.

Then you will be one of a few thousands. Meanwhile, a few tens of millions of people will have Vulkan capable hardware and in fact has it already today.

The writing is on the wall, the jump will happen sometime in the next three to five years. Either bite the bullet and get a new laptop, or don't and face the consequences. Up to you.

[Developer12]

Let us assume this change is announced and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be the last distribution to use the old way that your CPU can support.

That is supported until 2029.
Are you saying you will still be using your old crappy laptop in 2029?

Almost certainly.

[wertigon]

I'm not talking about video cards. Laptops and their chips tend to stick around a lot longer. I happen to be writing this from a terascale3 APU.

Let us assume this change is announced and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be the last distribution to use the old way that your CPU can support.

That is supported until 2029.
Are you saying you will still be using your old crappy laptop in 2029?

[Developer12]

Yes. The last card with Terascale architecture was released 03-04-2014 as Radeon R5 230. This was replaced by the R5 330 in May 2015. Let's assume another year for stocks to sell out, this means around Q2 2016, all Radeon GPUs sold since then was Vulkan capable. That is almost 7 years ago now.

Last Intel circuit was Iris 6200 released in Q2 2015, with the same logic last device sold with it should've been around 6 years ago.

As for Nvidia, they are not using Mesa and not interested in using Mesa, instead going with their own homebrewed solution. So not relevant.

I'm not talking about video cards. Laptops and their chips tend to stick around a lot longer. I happen to be writing this from a terascale3 APU.

A similar concern came up with the deprecation of midguard from panVK: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...requests/16915

There is a risk here: in the future, 2D workloads (like desktop compositors) might hard depend on Vulkan. It seems this is bound to happen but about a decade out. I worry about contributing to hardware obsolescence due to missing Vulkan drivers, however such a change would obsolete far more than Midgard v5... There's plenty of GL2 hardware that's still alive and well, for one. It doesn't look like Utgard will be going anywhere, even then.

[wertigon]

The biggest issue is that there are a lot of AMD GPUs out there that do not support vulkan. Making vulkan mandatory regresses them. *Maybe* it's possible to support vulkan on *some* later-gen terascale architectures, at reduced performance, but that support has not yet materialized.

Yes. The last card with Terascale architecture was released 03-04-2014 as Radeon R5 230. This was replaced by the R5 330 in May 2015. Let's assume another year for stocks to sell out, this means around Q2 2016, all Radeon GPUs sold since then was Vulkan capable. That is almost 7 years ago now.

Last Intel circuit was Iris 6200 released in Q2 2015, with the same logic last device sold with it should've been around 6 years ago.

As for Nvidia, they are not using Mesa and not interested in using Mesa, instead going with their own homebrewed solution. So not relevant.

[Developer12]

This argument assumes a low power OpenGL GPU draws less power than a low power Vulkan GPU. Since Vulkan is a much simpler technology it is much more likely Vulkan is the more power efficient chip.

OpenGL was and still is a good 3D API. Vulkan is just better in pretty much all respects. Good does not trump excellent.

As for Zink itself, the biggest impact it has is that it now is possible to build a Vulkan conformant hardware, build a small kernel module with only Vulkan calls, and then enjoy the rest of the stack om Linux Mesa. Making a GPU from scratch just got a whole lot easier.

The biggest issue is that there are a lot of AMD GPUs out there that do not support vulkan. Making vulkan mandatory regresses them. *Maybe* it's possible to support vulkan on *some* later-gen terascale architectures, at reduced performance, but that support has not yet materialized.