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.

Joshua Ashton known for his work on Valve's Linux graphics efforts opened the merge request yesterday so Zink would become part of the default drivers built by Mesa. His reasonings for promoting Zink as a default Gallium3D driver is that it's necessary for hardware-accelerated OpenGL on Adreno 700 series with the TURNIP Vulkan driver supporting the A7xx driver but not the Freedreno Gallium3D driver with it opting for Zink.

Nouveau developers are also looking at using Zink atop the NVK Vulkan driver by default for Turing and newer NVIDIA GPUs moving forward.

Plus there are other reasons too like Imagination preferring Zink for OpenGL support with their new PowerVR Mesa Vulkan driver. Plus even Intel and Radeon Linux users have found some successes in using Zink with the support continuing to improve. It wouldn't surprise me if the next time there's a major graphics architecture shift at Intel or AMD if they too decide to opt for Zink atop Vulkan rather than continuing to invest in their hardware OpenGL drivers.

The merge request is still pending but it wouldn't surprise me to see this land soon so at least Zink will now be built by default. It doesn't change the priority or behavior for the default OpenGL use except where overriden such as with the pending NVK preference, but it's overall a move in the right direction for a Zink'ed OpenGL future. Speaking of which, it's been some months since my last benchmarking bout with Zink so I'll be aiming to run some new tests soon.