Zink Lands Support For Partial Updates / Damage Handling

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Zink Lands Support For Partial Updates / Damage Handling

Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz is back at it working on some exciting improvements to Mesa and in particular for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zink-Partial-Updates-Damage

[mSparks]

Glorious.

See also:

https://developer.x-plane.com/2023/02/addressing-plugin-flickering/

The unsung hero of all this is Mike Blumenkrantz, head honcho and lead developer of Zink. He’s spent years getting Zink to the point it is at and is contentiously working on improving it, both in terms of supported features as well as performance. He’s also an absolute legend and none of this Zink interop X-Plane stuff would exist if it wasn’t for his help, not just in getting Zink to where it is but also answering tons of our questions during the integration. Big shout out to Mike! While I’m doing shout outs, it would be unfair of me to not also mention AMD. While they are partially the reason we are here today, they also provided us with help and driver updates to make Zink work together with X-Plane and every engineer of theirs that I have met along this journey has been nothing but kind and helpful.

[timofonic]

Is this stuff was baked in from the ground up in Vulkan in some way, right?

I still don't get why compositors still use OpenGL, they ALL should switch to Vulkan ASAP.

[dragorth]

What makes you think using Vulkan has any benefits over OpenGL for a compositor? The 2D plane with a bit of eye candy is going to be single threaded and light weight no matter which one you use.

[CommunityMember]

I still don't get why compositors still use OpenGL, they ALL should switch to Vulkan ASAP.

Are you funding that effort (either by contributing the PRs to do so, or hiring someone to do it)?

[remm]

Why is Valve interested in GL on VK since they're never going to use any NVidia GPU in their hardware ?

[timofonic]

Why is Valve interested in GL on VK since they're never going to use any NVidia GPU in their hardware ?

Please elaborate, you are very ambiguous. It's confusing.

This is about adding an OpenGL extension to Zink to help at desktop compositing performance.

Where did you read Nvidia? Zink runs OpenGL into Vulkan. Vulkan isn't exclusive to Nvidia at all.

Maybe I'm misreading and you meant something totally different. Please explain what you meant and correct me if I'm wrong.

[CommunityMember]

Vulkan isn't exclusive to Nvidia at all.

And some newer GPU hardware (typically on non x86 hardware) only has Vulkan drivers, which means Zink provides a long term solution for apps that are written for OpenGL (and there are many).

[You-]

What makes you think using Vulkan has any benefits over OpenGL for a compositor? The 2D plane with a bit of eye candy is going to be single threaded and light weight no matter which one you use.

Generally Vulkan is faster and will have less compatibility issues (mainly due to being newer and also have a better CTS to check conformance).

However targeting exclusively Vulkan will get you people with 10 year old hardware that will tell you you are forcing obscolescence and may even blame it on hardware manufacturers for twisting the software devs hands over it.

I recently found out that some nvidia hardware from 15 years ago had broken EGL drivers (which are no longer getting bug fixes for atleast 5 years) and that early intel igpus (core2 Duo/Quad so of a similar age) had broken GL rendering in mesa since 2021.

Unlike Apple you cannot just build for today/tomorrow, on linux you will have users from 20 years ago. But it is getting to the point that vulkan- first might become the preferred solution in a lot of places, and fast at that. Even before the end of 2024.

GTK as a toolkit might consider it. Nouveau driver for the GSP graphics cards is moving to Vulkan first, Asahi might do the same aswell. One of the mobile GPUs is already Vulkan only with Zink for GL.

The current holdouts are pretty big players: AMD and intel, but even here you never know when they might decide to shift focus.

[CommunityMember]

The current holdouts are pretty big players: AMD and intel, but even here you never know when they might decide to shift focus.

Also NVIDIA, but that is because for the professional applications (aka AutoCAD, etc.), they are OpenGL first, and only (and typically are only "certified" with specific versions of the driver) and none of those dGPU vendors are going to consider dropping their OpenGL drivers for their professional users until those applications change targets, which is likely to be closer to never.