HasVK Trims Some Fat For This Old Intel Hardware Vulkan Driver

[NM64]

99 percent of the users of those chips won't know what Vulkan is or what a graphics api is but it won't be important as basically everything that is essential would be working

Maybe 99% of the users that used Haswell when it was new - Haswell came in in 2013 remember.

I really doubt that the kind of "normie" people you speak of are going to be the ones still using Haswell, especially since said people are also more likely to use laptops and laptops around that era tended to have internal batteries instead and these same "normie" people not only aren't going to be aware of and/or following best practices to prolong long-term battery life but are also very much not going to be replacing an internal battery and would instead follow the route of "just buy a new laptop".

Desktop users are also more likely to have moved on to newer hardware for performance reasons - remember, Haswell maxes out at only 4core/8thread which is very much considered entry-level nowadays considering that i3 CPUs have used that configuration since early 2020 (you know, right before everybody and their dog decided to buy a new home PC).

You can rule out workstation and business users as well as there wouldn't be a flood of cheap LGA1150 Xeon CPUs on ebay otherwise.


And don't forget that Haswell launched before SSDs really hit the mainstream "normie" PC user, so that'll also make a dramatic difference in terms of the performance that these less-savvy users perceive between Haswell and anything newer (even if the single-threaded performance difference between something like Haswell and Comet Lake isn't that different).

[Tian]

Though, for my emulation-related interests, braswell is quite lacking on the single-threaded CPU front, so that's a use-case you can eliminate since the emulators that its CPU would be fast enough for (e.g. consoles before 2000) are the kind that are more likely to use OpenGL anyway.

what about slang shaders? they are for retroarch (emulation) but only work on vulkan, does that count for your interest? about cpu performance... yes its lacking, on my old e3500 desmume runs faster on windows than on my laptop with linux (e3500 has 2.7ghz vs 2.1 on n3050) however dolphin runs fine on the n3050 but not at all on the e3500.

[NM64]

about cpu performance... yes its lacking, on my old e3500 desmume runs faster on windows than on my laptop with linux (e3500 has 2.7ghz vs 2.1 on n3050) however dolphin runs fine on the n3050 but not at all on the e3500.

That's probably because the e3500 is a wolfdale Core 2 Duo chip that predates having an iGPU on the CPU itself, so the graphics feature-set of the motherboard's integrated graphics will be woeful (for example, all three of my Core 2 Duo laptops use Intel 965GMA which doesn't even support OpenGL 2.0 on Windows, though it can on Linux but that's still not enough for modern versions of Dolphin).

DeSmuME by comparison has a software rasterizer that is uses by default which tends to be more accurate than its OpenGL renderer so, as long as you have a GPU that can present a desktop image at all, then Desmume should work.

And to be clear, Core 2 Duo CPUs tended to have better IPC than the Atom-derived CPU cores up until very recently, like Intel 12th gen E-core recently, while even Celeron CPUs derived from Core 2 Duos had IPC comparable to an Athlon 64 which itself is only maybe 12% behind the IPC of a Core 2 Duo (though emulation seems to favor the Core 2 Duo more, making it more than that general 12%).

BTW protip: last I checked, melonDS ran faster and more accurately than DeSmuME.

[Developer12]

Having Vulkan support on Windows is not a critical feature at all. Like 99 percent of the users of those chips won't know what Vulkan is or what a graphics api is but it won't be important as basically everything that is essential would be working.

lots of stuff now runs on top of vilkan, from zink to rusticl to even some dialects of pytorch. having a vulkan driver is becoming a minimum-requirement for even the lowest-performing of smartphone chips.

[Tian]

That's probably because the e3500 is a wolfdale Core 2 Duo chip that predates having an iGPU on the CPU itself, so the graphics feature-set of the motherboard's integrated graphics will be woeful (for example, all three of my Core 2 Duo laptops use Intel 965GMA which doesn't even support OpenGL 2.0 on Windows, though it can on Linux but that's still not enough for modern versions of Dolphin).

DeSmuME by comparison has a software rasterizer that is uses by default which tends to be more accurate than its OpenGL renderer so, as long as you have a GPU that can present a desktop image at all, then Desmume should work.

And to be clear, Core 2 Duo CPUs tended to have better IPC than the Atom-derived CPU cores up until very recently, like Intel 12th gen E-core recently, while even Celeron CPUs derived from Core 2 Duos had IPC comparable to an Athlon 64 which itself is only maybe 12% behind the IPC of a Core 2 Duo (though emulation seems to favor the Core 2 Duo more, making it more than that general 12%).

BTW protip: last I checked, melonDS ran faster and more accurately than DeSmuME.

will have to check on melonds!

[Tian]

I just installed mesa 22.3 to test the hasvk driver and... WHY THE F@CK IS IT A VULKAN 1.2 DRIVER?! I had vulkan 1.3.224 on mesa 22.2 and it works perfectly, why did they removed crucial features (remember that dxvk requires vulkan 1.3)? Does this means that now I must keep the vulkan driver on 22.2 without updating it? I thought that the whole point of hasvk was to keep the driver "as is" (1.3) not make it worse (1.2).

[mangeek]

I just installed mesa 22.3 to test the hasvk driver and... WHY THE F@CK IS IT A VULKAN 1.2 DRIVER?! I had vulkan 1.3.224 on mesa 22.2 and it works perfectly, why did they removed crucial features (remember that dxvk requires vulkan 1.3)? Does this means that now I must keep the vulkan driver on 22.2 without updating it? I thought that the whole point of hasvk was to keep the driver "as is" (1.3) not make it worse (1.2).

I'm pretty sure the ANV driver was just reporting a version it was capable of as a driver, but not really when it was actually running on your hardware. Take a peek at mesamatrix.org, bits and pieces of Vulkan 1.2 and 1.1 weren't implemented on older Intel GPUs.

Check if things actually work the same, and if not, try seeing if there's a MESA env variable that reports Vulkan 1.3 conformance even if you don't actually have it.

[Tian]

I'm pretty sure the ANV driver was just reporting a version it was capable of as a driver, but not really when it was actually running on your hardware. Take a peek at mesamatrix.org, bits and pieces of Vulkan 1.2 and 1.1 weren't implemented on older Intel GPUs.

Check if things actually work the same, and if not, try seeing if there's a MESA env variable that reports Vulkan 1.3 conformance even if you don't actually have it.

Can't enter to mesamatrix.org so can't peek. There should be no env variable set to show vulkan 1.3, I have bee researching and it seems like its a labeling error given that the icd file shows vulkan 1.3.230 (mangohud reports 1.2.230), to be sure I wanted to check if the extensions worked (dynamicrendering is showed on hasvk thus the doubt), someone on gitlab told me about vk-gl-cts but its a pain to setup.

[mangeek]

Can't enter to mesamatrix.org so can't peek. There should be no env variable set to show vulkan 1.3, I have bee researching and it seems like its a labeling error given that the icd file shows vulkan 1.3.230 (mangohud reports 1.2.230), to be sure I wanted to check if the extensions worked (dynamicrendering is showed on hasvk thus the doubt), someone on gitlab told me about vk-gl-cts but its a pain to setup.

My apologies, I meant https://mesamatrix.net/

[Dukenukemx]

Great, now my laptop with it's Core™ i5-5300U is so bad that I shouldn't even use Vulkan on it. I guess I should playing Switch games on it using Vulkan. Why didn't someone tell me this sooner?