Zink Lands A Simple Fix To Boost Doom Performance By ~10x

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 9 February 2023 at 01:00 PM EST. 9 Comments
MESA
For fans of the Doom (2016) video game looking to enjoy the title with the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, a simple fix showed how addressing a simple oversight can boost the performance by a magnitude of 10x.

Mike Blumenkrantz discovered a missing Gallium3D capability "cap" that needed to be set for Zink and in turn the very small code change yielded around a 10x performance increase for running the Doom game atop the Zink driver.

Doom (2016) game now faster with Zink.


The code has been merged and is for setting Gallium3D's PIPE_CAP_SURFACE_REINTERPRET_BLOCKS when running atop a Vulkan 1.1 driver or a Vulkan driver exposing the KHR_maintenance2 extension.

Mike Blumenkrantz continues working relentlessly to improve the Mesa driver code as part of his work on Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team. Blumenkrantz wrote a new blog post as well today to express his frustration in all of the different Gallium3D caps and how simply being unaware of one/some caps to set can lead to missing performance optimizations -- in this case a 10x performance boost.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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