Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Now "100%-1000% Faster" For Many Scenarios

[SteamPunker]

Zink really seems to have the potential to get within striking distance or practically at parity with native OpenGL drivers. In some cases, this was already true with Zink even before this latest peformance breakthrough. Once it gets even close to native OpenGL driver performance, driver maintainers and Mesa developers should really consider deprecating native OpenGL drivers and concentrate on making the best possible Vulkan drivers, and assisting with further development of Zink. If Mike Blumenkrantz managed to get Zink to be this good from scratch, all by himself, imagine how much it can be improved even further, once a lot of driver development get freed up due to no longer having to maintain separate hardware-specific OpenGL drivers?

Eventually, it makes one wonder if Gallium3D will even remain useful, since Vulkan can perfectly play that same lower layer closer-to-the-metal role as well. Gallium3D will only continue to have value for legacy hardware that lack the features necessary to support Vulkan. Even some older generation hardware such as Terascale (supported by the r600 driver) could theoretically have a Vulkan driver developed for it, which might ease support for such older beasts in the longer term.

And when it comes to newer generation GPUs still to be released, the manufacturers and driver developers would be crazy to waste any more resources on developing Vulkan drivers and OpenGL drivers in parallel. Just focus entirely on Vulkan drivers, and let Zink handle the OpenGL stuff..

[smitty3268]

Zink really seems to have the potential to get within striking distance or practically at parity with native OpenGL drivers.

I think that remains to be seen. This is good news, but I suspect it's still likely to be significantly slower than native in a bunch of tests.

Eventually, it makes one wonder if Gallium3D will even remain useful

Zink runs on Gallium3D, so if you think Zink is useful then so is Gallium3D.

Even some older generation hardware such as Terascale (supported by the r600 driver) could theoretically have a Vulkan driver developed for it, which might ease support for such older beasts in the longer term.

Seems very unlikely, and since such hardware is no longer changing creating a whole new driver is going to be significantly more work than just finishing the OpenGL one and then never touching it again.

[camel_case]

Zink is the future, everyone will use it.

[oleid]

Zink is the future, everyone will use it.

I do, it is great for corrosion prevention!

[Snaipersky]

Zink runs on Gallium3D, so if you think Zink is useful then so is Gallium3D.

No, Zink provides a gallium3d interface, similar to Iris. Gallium state trackers (such as nine or opengl) run on top of it.

[microcode]

I do, it is great for corrosion prevention!

Zink oxide for the nose, when you're at the beach, lads.

[mitch074]

Well, my last test with Tomb Raider felt already strange on Mesa 21.1 and I couldn't believe the numbers I got with my RadeonVI in 4K.
RadeonSI: min 88, max 180, avg 154
Zink: min 134, max 231, avg 194 (edit: I think lightning like e.g. the sun is not rendered correctly)
DXVK: min 113, max 190, avg 161

It's great to see how well Zink is developing and I hope there will be more benchmarks soon.

Tomb Raider for Linux has no control on whether TressFX is enabled or not (if support is detected, it's automatically enabled even if the appropriate setting say it's not). Performance impact is huge, and from the blog post's top screen capture I can say that currently Zink doesn't enable it - which WILL make it potentially run faster on Zink than "native".
You can see the difference in Lara's hair - in Zink it's textured, on native you can count the strands.

[Azrael5]

I have always told that Linux operating systems could reach the best performance by optimization. Linux has all the means to optimize hardware far better than others. An any Linux Os has the possibility to get major performance from 3 to 10 times Windows' one. The best legacy Microsoft operating system in terms of efficiency, that is Xp, could be overcame without any problems by an any Linux operating system on the same legacy hardware because able to maximize the unexpressed abilities of the resources by software. This ability originates from flexibility. Flexibility works when diagnostics and adaptability operate together. Diagnostics have to determinate the features of the resources, while adaptability has to take benefit from all the features that resource owns.

[pracedru]

Wow if progress is going to continue like that, conventional OpenGL drivers are soon used as a compatibility/fallback path for Vulkan capable hardware. I wonder about the implications i.e. for the future of Mesa (or graphics drivers in general)? Will new hardware only get a Vulkan driver and the rest is handled by Zink? If yes, how much time could be saved in driver development? Will AMD replace their horrible Windows OpenGL driver with Zink? Will Android phones be able to update their OpenGL implementation via the Playstore?

Yes, this is really good news.
Maybe OpenGL will also have a uniform behavior across hardware.

[pinguinpc]

Anyone can test saint row games, grid autosports and shadow of mordor in opengl for fun ?