Raspberry Pi's Vulkan Driver Likely To See Better Performance This Year

V3DV as the open-source Vulkan driver within Mesa for Broadcom VideoCore hardware is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. This Vulkan driver continues improving with likely this year to bring more performance optimizations and possibly work on Vulkan 1.2 conformance.

Alejandro Piñeiro of Igalia presented at last weekend's FOSDEM 2022 conference on V3DV. Igalia continues working in cooperation with Raspberry Pi on this Mesa driver.

Much of the "current status" portion of the presentation has already been individually covered on Phoronix in the past with V3DV striking Vulkan 1.1 conformance, significant performance improvements over the past year, better windowing system integration, and also now having upstream GitLab CI integration for helping to fend off regressions.

The performance work has been quite significant for allowing more Vulkan games and other workloads to be able to run on the Raspberry Pi 4.

In looking ahead though they are eyeing more Vulkan extensions and features to implement for the V3DV driver. They also intend to conquer more performance optimizations for this Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver, improve the kernel interface for its DRM driver, and possibly start chipping away at Vulkan 1.2 conformance.

Those wanting to learn more about Igalia's work on this open-source Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver can do so via FOSDEM.org with Alejandro Piñeiro's slide deck as well as the video recordings now being available.