Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress On Apple Silicon Graphics, Promising OpenGL Speed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress On Apple Silicon Graphics, Promising OpenGL Speed

Asahi Linux developer Asahi Lina has posted an update on the ongoing work bringing up their Rust-written DRM kernel driver along with the AGX Gallium3D Mesa OpenGL driver as well as progress towards the in-development Vulkan driver too...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-Graphics-March-2023

[schmidtbag]

Very impressive progress. In some ways, I'm surprised they managed to outperform MacOS, seeing as this is still an immature driver that likely lacks optimization. But, graphics hardware always seems to have operated slower in Mac OS, no matter what the GPU is. I'm not really sure why; perhaps it was designed more with smoothness in mind rather than raw performance. There's also the possibility that Apple deliberately didn't optimize their OpenGL drivers, simply to push people to use Metal.

[Lbibass]

There's also the possibility that Apple deliberately didn't optimize their OpenGL drivers, simply to push people to use Metal.

That's exactly what has happened.

[Vorpal]

That's exactly what has happened.

Do you have proof or a citation for that claim?

Don't get me wrong: I'm no fan of Apple, but I'm even less of a fan of baseless claims.

[amxfonseca]

Do you have proof or a citation for that claim?

Don't get me wrong: I'm no fan of Apple, but I'm even less of a fan of baseless claims.

One thing we know for sure, OpenGL is officially deprecated in MacOS. So there is not a lot of incentive to optimize an API that will eventually be marked for removal.

I am not even sure if they provide “native” OpenGL drivers on the newer devices, or if they simply translate it to Metal calls, similar to how Zink works.

[anarki2]

One thing we know for sure, OpenGL is officially deprecated in MacOS. So there is not a lot of incentive to optimize an API that will eventually be marked for removal.

I am not even sure if they provide “native” OpenGL drivers on the newer devices, or if they simply translate it to Metal calls, similar to how Zink works.

There's a difference between not putting effort into making it fast, and deliberately making it slow.

[galad]

OpenGL in macOS arm is a translation layer around Metal, like MoltenVK for Vulkan or DXVK for for Direct3D 9/10/11.
It doesn't seem too optimized either. I guess the goal was to get it working.

[hyperchaotic]

That's exactly what has happened.

What Lina also wrote but wasn't quoted: "* Please don’t take the exact number too seriously, as there are other differences too (Xonotic runs under Rosetta on macOS, but it was also rendering at a lower resolution there due to being a non-Retina app). The point is that the results are in the same league, and we will only keep improving our driver going forward!"

[smitty3268]

There's a difference between not putting effort into making it fast, and deliberately making it slow.

It's the former. They only provide OpenGL 4.1 as the maximum supported version, and you can bet they haven't done any extensive optimizing since that time frame either. It's only provided for compatibility purposes these days, as they encourage everything to use Metal instead.

[Developer12]

completely missed in the article: the M1 GPU driver is now revolutionary in *two* ways, no longer one

Previously it was merely one of the first drivers written in rust. Now it stands as one of only two drivers to be exclusively explicit-sync, while being the furthest ahead.

Every other driver in mesa, with the exclusion of intel xe, is forced to support implicit sync and all of the performance-killing bookkeeping that comes with that. Along the way they've encountered and solved significant issues the intel team weren't even aware of.