Mir Continues Cleaning Up Their OpenGL Code, To Support Vulkan In Future

[humbug]

I'm not sure WHY Mir/Wayland even need to support Vulkan......? Isn't Vulkan for low level stuff? Games will use OpenGL/Vulkan/(Insert Future Thing) independently of the desktop, and what the desktop uses has ZERO effect on games and other graphically applications. OpenGL is hear to stay AFAIK, so why does Mir/Wayland want to support Vulkan?

Will Wayland and MIR supporting Vulkan improve our desktop 2D performance and responsiveness?

[teldar]

Will Wayland and MIR supporting Vulkan improve our desktop 2D performance and responsiveness?

It's rather unlikely. There little job done by compositor and desktop effects, so I don't think it will be very noticeable.

[JS987]

Will Wayland and MIR supporting Vulkan improve our desktop 2D performance and responsiveness?

GTK/Cairo/Qt would need to support GPU Rasterization using Vulkan similar to what is supported by Chrome
https://www.chromium.org/developers/...-rasterization

[justmy2cents]

Too bad that the CPU usage of a Vulkan compositor would be the same as an OpenGL compositor. Using Vulkan doesn't automatically lead to lower CPU usage everywhere you use it in all scenarios. Stop making shit up.

wouldn't this depend on how much command queues can be reused without resubmitting? then again, i doubt that typical compositor would need enough to show any real difference because even now i can't practically see the usage on my computer

[gens]

wouldn't this depend on how much command queues can be reused without resubmitting? then again, i doubt that typical compositor would need enough to show any real difference because even now i can't practically see the usage on my computer

you are bout bout right and wrong

vulkan will lead to lower cpu usage
the overhead of opengl in a compositor is very small

i have hit the cpu limit for opengl 3.3 with ~30k objects (same shader, same texture, etc., no instancing, times 2 for shadow map)
almost all of that is opengl validation
with some tricks (instancing and texture magic) 300k is not unrealistic (with opengl 4.4 it's absolutely do-able)

vulkan will also make much simpler drivers and can work without validation (by default), so less memory usage, less cache trashing and less cpu usage in general

note that all current window managers (compositing or not) are crap (i wrote a crap one myself) and wayland "shells" need to do much more then just put windows on screens

[smitty3268]

Not really. OpengL has high CPU overhead for game-related stuff, like tons of draw calls, tons of shaders/material switching and so on. You would be hard pressed to reach a point where OpenGL gets to be the bottleneck in a compositor...

I do however support the API abstraction layer as it will mean cleaner code and easier maintenance. You shouldn't expect noticable performance gains from switching from OGL to Vulkan (or any other) in a compositor.

I suspect the primary benefit of using Vulkan from Mir/Wayland will actually come from the mobile sector. Tile-based mobile GPUs are not able to be utilized in the best possible way by OpenGL, and there was an effort by the Vulkan devs to expose those capabilities and use them where possible. That should result in better battery life, I would assume. I doubt anyone really notices the difference on the desktop.

[dh04000]

i have hit the cpu limit for opengl 3.3 with ~30k objects (same shader, same texture, etc., no instancing, times 2 for shadow map)
almost all of that is opengl validation
with some tricks (instancing and texture magic) 300k is not unrealistic (with opengl 4.4 it's absolutely do-able)

This is what my first post was getting at. When will a Mir/Wayland compositor EVER reach 30k or 300k objects? The ability to do so is unneeded for the desktop.

[kyle-phoronix]

I suspect that Mir+Vulkan has more to do with phones and tablets than desktops. Since Mir is supposed to be used across all platforms eventually, it makes sense to port it to Vulkan even if the advantages on the desktop are minimal.

[ElectricPrism]

Don't you think you will find an article on phoronix benchmarking Mir vs Wayland wit Mir delivering slightly better performance?

Forgive my assumptions please, however, it seems that people out there still don't understand that Mir (is a compositor) and Wayland (is a protocol).

Therefore it's somewhat impossible to benchmark Mir vs Wayland as it's like comparing Goku and Bruce Lee.

You can however benchmark Weston vs Mir, or Mutter vs Mir, Gala vs Mir, KWin vs Mir - or even SteamOS Compositor vs Mir.

You cannot however benchmark Mir vs Wayland.

[TheSoulz]

Forgive my assumptions please, however, it seems that people out there still don't understand that Mir (is a compositor) and Wayland (is a protocol).

Therefore it's somewhat impossible to benchmark Mir vs Wayland as it's like comparing Goku and Bruce Lee.

You can however benchmark Weston vs Mir, or Mutter vs Mir, Gala vs Mir, KWin vs Mir - or even SteamOS Compositor vs Mir.

You cannot however benchmark Mir vs Wayland.

When people say MIR vs Wayland they mean a wayland compositor, ofc...