Mesa 23.1 Zink Change Further Lowers CPU Overhead, Less vRAM Utilization

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 23.1 Zink Change Further Lowers CPU Overhead, Less vRAM Utilization

Yet another Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver optimization has landed in Mesa 23.1 ahead of its official release next quarter...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Zink-DB-Descriptor-Mode

[Danny3]

Cool!
Now I wish that all desktop environments would add a Zink renderer.

[Snaipersky]

Cool!
Now I wish that all desktop environments would add a Zink renderer.

No such thing. Zink just translates GL/gallium calls to vulkan. As Zink becomes more and more complete, it'll be able to handle rendering a DE, but that isn't a fault of the DEs.

[Snaipersky]

I forced Zink globally some weeks ago with Fedora 37 and GNOME worked fine. It had Zink in the About -> Graphics settings pane.

Oh it's able to handle desktops now? Neat.

[writequit]

I tried running American Truck Simulator with it and the performance is close to native GL. Game reports driver is zink:

00:00:00.482 : [gl] driver: zink (AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (RADV NAVI21))

vs:

00:00:00.593 : [gl] driver: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (navi21, LLVM 15.0.7, DRM 3.49, 6.1.12-x64v3-xanmod1)

That seems pretty amazing to me.

[V1tol]

Oh it's able to handle desktops now? Neat.

Worked half a year ago with KDE, though I only logged in, checked that it reports zink and logged out 5 mins later.

[dimko]

I tried running American Truck Simulator with it and the performance is close to native GL. Game reports driver is zink:

00:00:00.482 : [gl] driver: zink (AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (RADV NAVI21))

vs:

00:00:00.593 : [gl] driver: AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (navi21, LLVM 15.0.7, DRM 3.49, 6.1.12-x64v3-xanmod1)

That seems pretty amazing to me.

Close to native, as in, it dips, or its constantly below, or its all over the place?

[writequit]

Close to native, as in, it dips, or its constantly below, or its all over the place?

Seems about the same really I only had a quick look around but performance with native is not great to begin with. I'd rather use proton but sometimes that has trouble with my input devices.

[brucethemoose]

Seems about the same really I only had a quick look around but performance with native is not great to begin with. I'd rather use proton but sometimes that has trouble with my input devices.

I think the only game that runs better in native (vs Proton) for me is Minecraft, which is also a prime candidate for Zink.

[TemplarGR]

Oh it's able to handle desktops now? Neat.

Why not? Desktops require a lower version of OpenGL, not 4.6, and Zinc is compliant IIRC.