A Proof-of-Concept Vulkan Window Compositor Is In the Works

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Proof-of-Concept Vulkan Window Compositor Is In the Works

With Vulkan 1.1 it should be possible to write a pure Vulkan Wayland compositor while a Phoronix reader has tipped us off to a developer starting work on a proof-of-concept Vulkan window compositor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-POC-Compositor

[mitcoes]

Good news, but how many DEs will be able to enjoy it? I count 2 : Mate and Xfce, I wish it would work with Gnome and Kde or they can merge this work if it arrives to work

[paupav]

Good news, but how many DEs will be able to enjoy it? I count 2 : Mate and Xfce, I wish it would work with Gnome and Kde or they can merge this work if it arrives to work

If standard desktop (MATE) supports it it will be more than enough.

[Azrael5]

that's the best real news of the whole year.

[R41N3R]

I'm waiting as well for some news about the Vulkan renderer for Kwin :-)

[ddriver]

that's the best real news of the whole year.

How so?

Vulkan is beneficial mostly to reduce draw call overhead.

A window compositor does close to no work. It renders a few rectangles with a flat mapped texture on them.

It will see minuscule to no benefit from Vulkan.

Granted, it wouldn't hurt, but aside from the "cool factor" it is pretty much a pointless, albeit modest effort.

[gsedej]

Compiz used to take much cpu

[GunpowaderGuy]

Hope this/ this idea gets turned into a framework , that actually sees real world use

[emblemparade]

How so?

What will be nice about this is not necessarily performance, but removing OpenGL ES as a requirement for accelerated Wayland desktops. It will allow for a minimal overall stack, probably less use of resources.

Also, as you know there's some performance overhead when running OpenGL games on an OpenGL desktop. I'm guessing this has to do with the driver managing multiple GL contexts. Perhaps with Vulkan this can be avoided?

[ddriver]

So now we do care about cutting down on overheads, abstractions and dependencies? What happened to "let's port it to web assembly"

BTW I wasn't aware that OpenGL ES in particular is a requirement. In fact I am pretty sure it works with regular OpenGL, which will be a dependency for a bunch of software that will likely never get ported to Vulkan, and thus a necessity.