Compute PBO Download Support Merged For Mesa 22.0, Xnine Comes For Source Engine Games

Following experimental Zink work to improve the NVIDIA driver support as part of the broader Copper initiative that also allows running Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan for Wayland's Weston compositor, another milestone has now been reached.

As what developer Mike Blumenkrantz says will be his last update of the calendar year, the latest excitement is getting compute PBO download support merged into Mesa 22.0-devel. For some select scenarios it can lead a "2-10x performance improvement" but more important making some games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive now work well on Mesa 22.0. The PCSX3 emulator is another use-case that will work much better now with Zink thanks to this pixel buffer object download support using compute shaders.

The other excitement of the day is Xnine for easily running Gallium3D's Nine state tracker / API for games leveraging DXVK natively on Linux. Currently that is for some Source Engine games like Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2. Instead of using DXVK, the Xnine project offers a simple library you can LD_PRELOAD prior to starting those select games for using Gallium Nine directly with those native Linux games where as traditionally Gallium Nine has been for use in Wine-based environments.

Mike is finding great results with using Xnine and roughly comparable though to the DXVK frame-rates. However, Nine was found to use much less CPU time than DXVK. Xnine is hosted on GitHub.

See Mike's blog for the latest details.