Zink Now Supports OpenGL 4.5 Over Vulkan With Mesa 21.1

It was just yesterday we were talking about Zink achieving OpenGL 4.3 support and wondering if OpenGL 4.4 or potentially even 4.5 could be buttoned up in time for Mesa 21.1... Well, as of a few minutes ago Zink now is advertising OpenGL 4.5 support for this graphics API layer built atop Vulkan.

As noted previously there have been experimental patches going back months bringing Zink to OpenGL 4.5/4.6 albeit various hacks and improvements were needed before upstreaming. Now though Mike Blumenkrantz has been on quite a spree working under contract for Valve and getting this material straightened out and suitable for upstreaming.

So even though OpenGL 4.3 was just crossed off this week, OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 both saw their necessary support patches land today. The newest code has Zink now providing OpenGL 4.5 over Vulkan. That's quite the good ol' bumperino.

Zink does support some OpenGL 4.6 extensions on Mesa Git already but items like the SPIR-V extensions and others are left to be resolved.

While its catching up to the latest OpenGL spec, it will be interesting to see the performance optimizations that may materialize for Mesa 21.1. There still is about two months to go until the Mesa 21.1 feature freeze and then releasing likely in May, so we'll see what more comes on the Zink front in the weeks ahead.