Mesa OpenGL Threading Work Sees Much Reduced Memory Footprint For OpenGL Calls

[Luke_Wolf]

Back when Vulkan was in its infancy and it was believed it will cure cancer and everything, there was a presentation floating around saying OpenGL itself can trim fat to become nimble to the point of rivaling Vulkan. Of course, OpenGL won't do everything Vulkan can, but this improvement right here says that presentation was at least partially right.

Vulkan did cure cancer as far as graphics goes. It wasn't just a matter of "trimming the fat" OpenGL just wasn't a good abstraction for various reasons and this was well understood even prior to Vulkan which is why Direct3D became so dominant. OpenGL just sucked. As it turns out however Vulkan is at the perfect level of abstraction for writing other APIs ontop of which is why it's thanks to Vulkan and DXVK that most games now work on Wine. However besides merely emulating Windows this is important for another reason that hasn't been exercised yet: if let's say Valve wanted to create a cross-platform high level graphics API that didn't suck and targeted Vulkan... they can do that without having to fuss with getting it accepted into drivers. Let me repeat: It destroyed vendor lock in and opened up the graphics API market for innovation. Furthermore Implementations exist for Vulkan riding on top of DX12 and Metal. Vulkan is the glue that destroys vendor lock in at all levels, so if there's a task that's "curing cancer" in the graphics API space... that's it, and Vulkan solved it.

[bug77]

The advantage of Vulkan lies not only in performance but also in simplifying drivers and their maintenance, by leveraging complexity.
Additionally, it established a new standard built upon fresh modern foundations.

Yeah, the same way ASM simplifies programming by doing away with the complexity of high-level languages and providing you with a very concise list of instructions...
It got some adoption after all, but for the first few years it made like no impact at all.