V3DV Driver For Raspberry Pi Closing In On Vulkan 1.0

[phoronix]

Phoronix: V3DV Driver For Raspberry Pi Closing In On Vulkan 1.0

The V3DV open-source Vulkan driver being developed by consulting firm Igalia for the Raspberry Pi Foundation is nearing official support for Vulkan 1.0...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=V3DV-RaspberryPi-1.0-Near

[AJenbo]

Nice! Imho the Pi getting Vulkan support is an important step in overall Vulkan adoption.

[kaprikawn]

It'll be interesting to see OpenGL ES vs Vulkan performance on the Pi. If there's any place where the performance gains of Vulkan are needed, it's something like the Raspberry Pi.

[rene]

so I understood correctly that an independent open source developer wrote an Vulkan driver for older Raspberry Pies https://hackaday.com/2020/06/22/vulkan-for-the-pi-3/ while the company behind it rather invested in another commercial developer?

[jaxa]

The GPU is a weak point for Pi4, and it might remain unchanged in a Pi5. So it's important to squeeze out all of the performance.

[Rccero]

This is thrilling, playing Dolphin with less virtual-underclock would be sweet, and giving performance margin for PPSSPP to apply graphical improvements.

I wonder if Pi4 hardware could support the latest Vulkan 1.2, or at least most of its extensions.

[Chris256]

Nice! Imho the Pi getting Vulkan support is an important step in overall Vulkan adoption.

It also makes the RPi4 much more potent as a platform itself, the shader units of the GPU can be a pretty powerful tool for other stuff than graphics under the right circumstances, and with Vulkan there's a lot less bottlenecks than with OpenGL ES.

[Remdul]

It also makes the RPi4 much more potent as a platform itself, the shader units of the GPU can be a pretty powerful tool for other stuff than graphics under the right circumstances, and with Vulkan there's a lot less bottlenecks than with OpenGL ES.

This, bottlenecks.

I build a standalone VR headset (very much WIP) with a RPI2, GL2 renders 2x FBO @ 600x600px for each eye @ 60Hz (Waveshare 7" display) with a simple photogrammetry scanned scene (20k poly, 1x 2048x2048 texture). Framerate maxes out near display frequency (unfortunately with some tearing, GL driver issue it seems). Works surprisingly well, latency is great. Does barrel distortion (in vertex shader), but diffraction in PS is to heavy to meet 60fps. Some extra room to spare, e.g. for more detailed geometry, or lower thermals/longer battery duration would be sweet. I used the MPU9250 for IMU via GPIO. Oh yeah I forgot to mention the €7 battery with integrated solar panel.

Vulkan would probably help a bunch to render the two FBOs more in parallel, dropping some overhead. Ultimately I'd like to upgrade the display to the Waveshare 5.5" @ 1920x1080, so 2x 1080 FBO @ 60Hz would be required for that. Don't think I can meet that with just GLES2, except perhaps with RPI4 (once the drivers are sorted out that is), but RPI4 thermals are bad for something strapped to your forehead.

[terrywang]

Running Manjaro ARM + KDE Plasma on Pi 4 8GB is surprisingly smooth (can get lagging if cooling becomes an issue - common).

I can run all Plasma with pretty much all KWin eye-candies adopted from Compiz, love those using OpenGL ES 3.1 rendering backend ;-) lol However, I cannot run kitty (which requires OpenGL 3.3 and no backward compatibility on the road map), the good thing is that Vulkan driver is almost there (v3dv), very close to Vulkan 1.0 comformant, kitty developer is happy to port it.

Keen to see if Vulkan makes a difference for KDE Plasma use case (not that common I guess).