Mesa Looks At Making The Zink Driver Build By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Looks At Making The Zink Driver Build By Default

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation continuing to prove itself robust and as performant as native hardware OpenGL drivers, the Mesa developers continue exploring new opportunities for it. Given its successes, a merge request has been opened so Zink would become part of the default drivers built by Mesa out-of-the-box without needing to manually enable it for compilation...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-MR-Zink-Default-Drivers

[Sethox]

There are plenty of bad Open Source name projects, but Zink sure fits well in the grand scheme of things.
Which reflects onto the rest of the project and it's necessity.

[ehansin]

There are plenty of bad Open Source name projects, but Zink sure fits well in the grand scheme of things.
Which reflects onto the rest of the project and it's necessity.

"I get my OpenGL via ZoV (aka Zink over Vulkan)!"

I like the sound of that And yeah, seems like a stellar project and that Mike guy's blogging makes for both interesting reading and an entertaining style as well.

[mrg666]

Any improvement/fix/optimization in Vulkan will directly apply to OpenGL (and D3D with DXVK) . Such a nice move!

[Snaipersky]

Zink benchmarks woo! Here's to hoping Intel will have a better showing on their A-series.

[mdedetrich]

This is kind of inevitable, at some point in time graphics card driver authors will stop directly targeting OpenGL and instead it will be provided by Zinc via Vulkan just like Microsoft does with earlier versions of D3D/DirectX.

And its kind of awesome because it means we might more or less get a reference implementation that will be consistent (i.e. Zink) instead of the historic problem that OpenGL has where it behaves slightly differently on each platform. Zinc also contains a lot of the game/executable specific workarounds (something that in the past has been closed information to the like of GeForce experience).

[ReaperX7]

Will be interesting to see how this goes over. I can see it being more for Nouveau where there's a clear lack of good support, but AMD and Intel generally have well developed OpenGL systems in Mesa. I think even the Professional AMD driver oglp uses their new PAL subsystem which runs the same as Vulkan. Will be interesting to see how this plays out in the long term, but we did see a fundamental shift with Gallium back when it first arrived, so Zink is basically doing the same thing.

[Vistaus]

There are plenty of bad Open Source name projects, but Zink sure fits well in the grand scheme of things.
Which reflects onto the rest of the project and it's necessity.

In Dutch, it's bad indeed, because “zink” means “to sink”.

But in English, I like the name.

[clippy]

Does mesa even have a native OpenGL implementation for the new Intel Xe driver? Seems like a natural cutoff point to me.

[DarkFoss]

With the open source Nvidia driver moving to Zink this seems like a no-brainer.