A NVIDIA Engineer In His Spare Time Wrote A Vulkan Driver That Works On Older Raspberry Pi

[coder]

This is sort of a deja vu to Rob Clarke making the Etnaviv (Qualcomm Vivante) driver while being employed by TI.

Vivante is its own thing - nothing to do with Qualcomm. Mostly used in older MediaTek SoCs, I think.

Qualcomm's GPU line is call Adreno (an anagram of Radeon, since it came from a group once owned by ATI).

I wonder how long Martin Thomas will be employed by Nvidia while doing developing work for their competitors?

The Pi doesn't compete with anything in their product stack. Even the GPU of the humble X1 will run circles around its crap VideoCore.

[coder]

If you haven't played around with RISC-OS on the RPI, just give it a try to see what can be achieved, and that is without any GPU acceleration.
The GUI's feel extreme fast and responsive.

The Pi 4's ARM cores are collectively more powerful than its GPU. And they all share the same memory. So, it's not saying much that it seems faster without GPU acceleration. The main benefit of harnessing the GPU would be to free up a few more cycles on the ARM cores.

[Raka555]

The Pi 4's ARM cores are collectively more powerful than its GPU. And they all share the same memory. So, it's not saying much that it seems faster without GPU acceleration. The main benefit of harnessing the GPU would be to free up a few more cycles on the ARM cores.

It says gnome is slow and bloated, which was my argument.

[coder]

It says gnome is slow and bloated, which was my argument.

Uh, not gonna touch that. Suffice to say I don't use it.

My point was that, to the extent the Pi can deliver a snappy UI experience, GPU acceleration shouldn't be a major factor one way or the other.

[AndyChow]

Amazing what a single engineer can do in his spare time, given a couple of years. Amazing.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

I agree with you, but I am not so sure the gnome performance problems on RPI is down to GPU drivers.
My take on it is that gnome is just so bloated that it thrashes the CPU cache on most RPIs.

No, the problem is that the GPU drivers don't have enough of the hardware compositing and 3D features enabled to offload enough of the workload from the CPU. It shouldn't even be running on the CPU because Mutter/Wayland requires modern 3D acceleration hardware, i.e. decent OpenGL support. Intel HD Graphics on low-end x86 chips don't use the CPU for compositing and rendering the UI. This isn't just a GNOME 3 problem - it's a problem all over the place with applications not getting any UI acceleration on ARM chips because the drivers just plain outright suck. The GPU's aren't bad and they have enough horsepower to tackle 3D multi-layer UI composition - on Android - but the drivers for Linux are incomplete and just plain awful.

If you haven't played around with RISC-OS on the RPI, just give it a try to see what can be achieved, and that is without any GPU acceleration.
The GUI's feel extreme fast and responsive.

WHAT?! RISC-OS has like Windows 3.1 style UI graphics in it. It doesn't use GPU cycles because it doesn't need to, just like I don't need a Core i5 to run Windows 95.

[krOoze]

Does it have a shader compiler or does it still accept only assembly?

[Paradigm Shifter]

Three things immediately ran through my head reading this:

1) Wow.
2) I wish I had more free time.
3) I wish I was that good at coding (I mean, I get by, but I doubt I'll ever be the level of some of the driver/kernel/BIOS engineers)...

[starshipeleven]

it's a problem all over the place with applications not getting any UI acceleration on ARM chips because the drivers just plain outright suck. The GPU's aren't bad and they have enough horsepower to tackle 3D multi-layer UI composition - on Android - but the drivers for Linux are incomplete and just plain awful.

there are pretty crap 3D drivers in Android too, just saying. Which is sad as the hardware itself is actually capable.

[Giovanni Fabbro]

there are pretty crap 3D drivers in Android too, just saying. Which is sad as the hardware itself is actually capable.

On the contrary: Android gets full GPU acceleration everywhere. You can get a mid-range phone from any company and every video program gets accelerated and can play 1080p (or higher) video on any capable screen, as well as 3D graphics support for any game on Google Play. You can't say that about Linux desktop distros.

Linux gets full GPU acceleration at your desktop/login manager...only on x86 hardware (prove me wrong).